


A future in these lines

by lilith_morgana



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, Sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-03
Updated: 2017-09-29
Packaged: 2018-02-19 17:25:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 28,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2396618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not always about holding hands. In the end it turns out it's about a lot more than that. ME3 moments and variations. Sequel to “Entropy”. Jane Shepard/Zaeed Massani.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Once more unto the breach

**Author's Note:**

> So, sequel to "Entropy" coming up. Not going to make any lofty promises about updating extremely often, but I will get to that finishing line, I promise you that.

_let's have a round for these freaks and these soldiers  
_ _a round for these friends of mine_  
( **carey – joni mitchel** l)

_once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more_  
( **henry v - shakespeare** )

.

* * *

  
Up close the galaxy looks ordinary, just the usual drill: exchange of credits, squabbling between Council races, your average slavers and spice dealers, ships full of refugees getting blown up or denied entry to the richer planets. If you squint you can fool yourself that nothing's going on but back away another inch and you'll catch the ugly truth.

Out here in the Caleston Rift, several hours away from the Milky way, it's easier to forget the threat to Earth and humanity.

Zaeed downs his second beer, eyeing a couple of inane-looking marines on shoreleave to his right. They are having a loud discussion about Commander Shepard and he feels like it concerns him - for reasons that he'd much rather not dig too goddamn deep into but there you go - so he keeps his wits about him. There's been a flood of shows and documentaries outlining the fate of humanity's first Spectre since her return to the Alliance and while he's not keeping track of all the bullshit or the direction it's headed, he'd say it's more or less common knowledge now that the commander came back with a few loose wires.

_Goddamn idiots._

"... never heard if there really  _was_  a trial," of the soldiers say. He's young and scrawny with a spotty face. Zaeed wouldn't trust him to carry a razor, much less a rifle.

"Damn Shepard walks out of anything," another one cuts in. "Read that article about her time on Akuze. Some crazy shit right there."

"I dunno. Heard they took her ship this time," a third one – a thick-necked, red-faced son of a bitch – offers.

A woman by his side nods excitedly. "Locked her away in the brig, last I heard."

Music pulsates through the walls in this place: bass-heavy, tune-light. It has sharp edges and an underlining sense of hysteria that Zaeed can't shake, like an itch you can't scratch.

"She's real popular though," the red-faced one adds. "Crazy as a varren but popular. Anyone else saying what she's been saying, they'd question her sanity, strip her of her rank."

"What, you don't think  _you'd_  get away with blowing up all those batarians and blaming the Reapers, Sanderson?"

They all laugh as Zaeed calls for a third drink, clenching his teeth around the order and the irritation.

"Get those loud bastards another round on me," he tells the turian behind the bar. "If they agree to shut the hell up."

He's got a shitload of problems at the moment but a lack of credits is not one of those. Shepard had seen to that six months ago. And then she had, to the best of his knowledge, seen to her own imprisonment by returning the Normandy to the Alliance Navy and getting herself locked up like a goddamn war criminal. Stupid, stubborn bitch. He'd have talked her out of it if he could but he hadn't been around for it, had thought it best to disappear off the radar to deal with his own trouble instead of piling it up at her feet like everyone else in her goddamn life. Besides, it's not like you simply talk Commander Jane Shepard out of things she's got her mind set on – especially not of it involves her tight bonds to the military organisation that ate her whole and spat her out again when they were done with her, judging her experience  _implausible_  and her actions  _questionable_. Last he heard from her she was in custody and her communication channels cut off.

Zaeed's fingers curl around the bottle, whitening. Suddenly his omni-tool flares up and as he flicks the screen open he notices the marines do the same, as do several other guests at the bar.

"Turn off the music!" Someone shouts. "Switch on the ANC, now!"

Within seconds several screens broadcast the same thing, in bits and pieces and stuttering, jarring noises: the Reapers have reached Earth, London has fallen, the planet is under attack. Emergency protocol is being activated and Zaeed's stomach lurches in a rare, painful way. He's felt it ever since he saw those goddamn pods in the goddamn Collector ship and he feels it again now, a protectiveness rising from some unknown depths inside him.  _You're not doing this shit to us, you ugly bastards. You're not taking my planet._ He despises Earth and the very notion of patriotism alike, but that's not the damn point. If this isn't  _different_ , then he doesn't know what is. As he gets to his feet and passes the gaping marines he allows one perfectly placed elbow to hit the red-faced one right between his eyes.

_That's for calling her crazy,_ _jackass_ _._

Then he fires up his comm links and heads for his ship. It's time to get back to work.


	2. Above rank and file

On Menae she finally stops long enough to take in what's happened.

On Menae, half-way inside a burning shipwreck on a moon orbiting around a burning Palaven, Shepard stands absolutely still for a few seconds and opens her mind to the flurry of images and insights that scatter all over her. Earth, Mars, the Illusive Man at the Archive – _you were a tool, an agent with a single purpose_  – and everything that came after; Kaidan being rushed away to surgery, the hospital at the Citadel that had been much too crowded to instil any sort of hope in her. They're past all that now. Long past hope and faith, running on determination and anger, an eagerness to avenge every fallen ally.

It's going to be a long war for those who still count the losses.

"Shepard." Garrus is beside her now, voice urgent and low. "We've got to pick up the pace."

She nods, starts moving again.

Time had slipped away from her in the brig; she had somehow forced herself to stop caring about it, the passing of days on the outside while she was stuck on the inside organising reports and signing export/import requests like a proper security guard. She had cut off the stream of time to protect her sanity – always a survivor first and foremost – and now it comes heading towards her again, crashing into her carefully arranged system like a Reaper.

While she had always suspected the collective wills and authorities of Admirals Anderson and Hackett would have gotten her ship out of drydock and herself out of inaction sooner or later, the attack on Earth had still hit them out of nowhere and left them no time for preparations. You are always ready but you can't always be  _ready_. Her dog tag around her neck again now, but the feel of it has shifted from back when she first received it; its mix of metals is cool and light, weighs almost nothing.

They keep moving on Garrus's orders and Shepard listens to him explaining the planet to Lieutenant Vega as they cross a field where a few husks are being shot at by turians lined up behind a large shelter. Vega is full of questions now that he's fallen in line after his stunt on Mars. She had itched to smash his skull when he all but wrecked their escape route because of his own reckless death wish and it towers inside her now as well, the anger that she needs to deal with once they have a moment to themselves. They don't, so instead she listens to the guided tour behind her.

"This moon and its sister moon were classified by the Hierarchy. They feared a clever enough enemy force might try to smash them into Palaven during the Krogan wars."

"That's an option now?" she asks Garrus who looks at her over his shoulder, mandibles twitching.

"Last resort." They all duck as a Reaper beam screeches through the air – far away but not far enough  _not_  to trigger instincts. "It's too hard to evacuate and it would only kill the groundside forces."

"Right."

The lieutenant looks sideways at her but says nothing, as though he  _hasn't_  been thinking what Shepard is thinking, what has branded itself inside her brain since Vancouver – that they might not be able to save the planets, that they might have to blow them up system by system until the Reapers are stuck somewhere in time. He's a good soldier with a mind for tactics; he must have been trying out the same thoughts. But they've had the same story told over and over ever since Earth so Shepard gives her subordinate a brief nod before looking at Garrus. They might be past hope but she intends to do her best to deny it.

"Did we ever tell you about Saren, Lt?"

.

.  
.

Later, after a shower and three mugs of Normandy-coffee Shepard scratches the back of her head with one of the datapads in her hands as she follows Comm Specialist Traynor through the second deck.

"A fire?" she repeats, re-reading the message from Joker while talking to him at the same time.

"The AI core's gone haywire," he confirms.

"He's right, Commander." Traynor stops by a console that appears unresponsive to whatever command or code she attempts to give it.

"Great." Shepard exhales and tries to remember to lower her shoulders while she's at it. Her entire body feels tense and heavy. "I'll go check it out."

The turmoil in the AI core, she thinks afterwards when she walks back up the stairs to make a call to Admiral Hackett, is precisely the kind of unforeseeable events that used to make her initial runs with the Alliance so much fun. They are also the kind of thing that make her sleep uneasy now because every mistake matters at this point, every step outside the margins she has drawn for them. What used to make for neat stories to swap over drinks has become life and death, another name for her memorial wall.

Of course, Hackett isn't exactly lifting that load off her, either.

"The reality is, Shepard, everything I'm doing is a delaying action for you."

She inhales deeply, exhales again, hoping he doesn't notice her momentary lack of confidence. It's the prothean device that eats away at the corners of her mind, all the unknown variables and implications of it, all its inherit danger. The atomic bomb during the Second World War. She remembers reading about that for some N7 course, seeing old photos of nuclear wastelands.

"Yes, sir."

He sacrificed the entire second fleet to provide cover for the third and the fifth. She hears the numbers there in his voice, fathoms the losses that were necessary but never acceptable and a wave of compassion hits her stomach. Admiral Hackett who is hard and unrelenting, never looking for the easy way out but a good officer, a good  _man_. When he first heard that the other marines had dubbed her Butcher of Torfan he had looked at her, seen the uneasy harshness curved around that title, and nodded simply.  _I've been called worse than that, lieutenant._

She wants to give him the same kind of nod now; she knows he would never allow it.

.

.  
.

"You look tired, Shepard." Liara's voice is soft, her words falling gently across the room. She's by her screen as usual but her expression is a relaxed one which tells Shepard it's a relatively slow day for the information broker aboard.

"I  _am_  tired."

A couple of years ago she'd never have admitted such a thing – would never have displayed it openly enough for anyone to pick up on it, either. It had been part of the training, part of the package. Everything is different now. In small ways, everything has been altered.

"Come in, sit down."

Shepard brushes past Glyph and slumps down in an armchair near Liara's bed. Her quarters are neat as usual, kept clean and sterile by a lack of belongings more than anything. These days they don't carry much with them.

"Did you have anything for me?" She makes the question sound casual but the outlines of it are frayed and her emotions are showing, she can tell by the way the asari attempts to hide her own.

"Yes, Shepard."

The leather feels dry and cool in the curve of her neck as she leans back, folding her arms across her chest like any commanding officer awaiting a report. Codes of conduct to keep other things at bay, the endless alienation of yourself. Liara offers a brief smile.

"Zaeed Massani," she reads off her datapad. "Was last seen in the Horsehead Nebula tracking down a Cerberus vessel. He appears to have made no attempts of hiding his identity or the signature of his own ship. Docked at Cresti spaceport two days ago. No further reports available."

Shepard grins inwardly. Not Zaeed's style to use covers; he can complain all he wants about her lack of stealth, given his own preference for keeping his name visible in everything he does. _If the goddamn Reapers blow me to pieces at least I want them to know who they killed,_ he says in her memory or her imagination. Maybe both. Six months in lock up and your start to lose your way inside your own mind.

"Why's he going after Cerberus?" she says, mostly to herself but Liara frowns, taking on the question herself. Occupational habit, that inability to let things be untouched, left alone or researched by someone else. A single-minded,obsessive salarian scientist, she thinks at times. That's all anyone ever is.

"I don't know that, Shepard. Do you want me to find out?"

"No." She pauses, re-thinks. The danger of being friends with the Shadow Broker is that lines of privacy and ethics start to blur in the face of curiosity and greed. "Not yet. I'll get back to you."

She allows herself to remain in the armchair for a moment longer, eyes closed, not thinking too deeply about the wave of relief that wraps itself around her like a blanket.


	3. At the gates of Hades

  
  
  
The hangar on the nearest moon outside of Omega is packed so tight with people on the run that Zaeed has to stand pressed up against the nose of someone's wrecked shuttle - an old Turian model, popular to make replicas of, he remembers somewhere at the back of his mind - to avoid having a loud krogan merc feeling him up, sending sour breaths down his neck.

No ships allowed to orbit around Omega, no shuttles going in he learns and re-learns here, but these fools - Zaeed included - keep trying. At least half the crowd in this place is looking to profit on the refugees, he wagers, but then there are a few like him as well, a few homeless, hopeless fools searching for people angry enough to put up a hell of a fight. He's not expecting them to be able to do much but anything will do at this point. He's here for that.

As the low-quality screens flare up with the noise and colours of the intergalactic news channel, he has to admit to himself that he's here partly for that, too. There's the usual blur of footage and vids of Palaven burning, turians falling, Earth under attack, faces of important people that are missing or confirmed dead, faces of hundreds of thousands that are dead too but insignificant, uncounted. War comes with a fucked-up set of morals to begin with and this one is like nothing else. Zaeed's pretty sure not even the miserable preachy bastards that are usually on air, offering their professional opinion on politics or council matters - _the multifaceted face of contemporary cross-spieces relationships_ and similar bullshit - could have counted on this. He wonders if they're all blown to pieces now or if they'll show up at the end of this war like some nasty surprise, analysing the implications of large-scale intergalactic war across the solar systems and how it will forever change the face of the universe.

And then there's a moment of raspy, semi-disconnected comm-links and the images on screen flicker worse than before as the nagging voice of some human reporter Zaeed only vaguely recalls having seen before appears.

"Live from the war effort... our troops.... SSV Normandy." He only catches every other word but it's strangely _enough_ , a flush of warmth into his body even before the reporter looks into the cam and offers what he guesses is her best serious-but-sexy look. She just looks tired and he can't tell if it's part of the package or a side-effect of trying to cover the ridiculously depressing flow of news from the Systems Alliance's best and brightest. Not _his_ type, that's for damn sure. "Commander Shepard and Mayor Alenko are hard at work... Fleet Admiral Hackett..."

Zaeed scratches the back of his neck - a fresh, stinging cut there; he should find some new medigel for that - and turns his gaze away from the screen. He feels, vaguely, like he's been ran over though he can't say by what or _whom_ , only that it leaves him somewhat out of breath.

 

  
  


* * *

 

  
  
  
“I would have figured you'd be all about humanity first, Massani.” The woman in front of him adjust herself in her seat, her gun still resting on the table.  
  
He shrugs. “Turns out I'm not, sweetheart.”  
  
The term of endearment makes her snort and rake one gloved hand through her hair. She's almost his age, voice like a chain-smoking bar singer and deadly fucking reactions that had nearly landed him another bullet in his brain half an hour ago, as she caught him snooping around her flat. He'd been looking for clues about a couple of Cerberus trails that have gone cold lately, she'd been looking for intruders to kill. Turns out they have mutual friends and – more importantly – mutual enemies. Rahida isn't one for wasting ammo on someone who might be useful to her and neither is he, so instead they have cracked open a bottle of vodka as some kind of arcane ritual. A drink to shaky trust and not slitting each other's throats.  
  
“What did Cerberus do to piss you off?”  
  
Well, that's the billion dollar question. He'd left the Normandy in a hurry, wrapped up in thoughts of revenge and Vido and the Reapers and half-arsed plans for the filthy amount of credits he'd made, blowing up enemies with the most impressive soldier in the galaxy. When he signed the contract he had practically _drooled_ just thinking about the money. Now it's almost as if he can't spend it fast enough.  
  
“They're a bunch of crazy fucking bastards,” he says, looking at the drink in his hand. He's not going to taste it as long as there's a loaded gun pointed at him, but he's got to admit it looks damn fine.  
  
“I sold some information about their plans for a base on Earth.” Rahida grins as she catches him pining for his vodka, then she takes a sip of her own. “Not popular.”  
  
He exhales and tastes the alcohol, not taking his good eye off the weapon on the table. “Assholes can have Earth all they want now. As long as they stay there, I won't goddamn mind.”  
  
“True, that.”  
  
Except it's not, not for either of them.  
  
There's a ripple through the air, a shade of familiarity flaring up between them and he thinks of Shepard, of the Normandy and long off-duty hours spent trash-talking the streets back on their homeworld. _You ever visited Boston? More human supremacy idiots per square foot than actual breathable air. Gotta be better than Budapest, though._ Nothing like hating your origins together, he finds. Nothing like having that powerful, vast history in common. 

Zaeed grew up in a filthy little hole in the wall, a goddamn dump outside of London - later Berlin, Paris, every formerly famous city now gone to hell. Grew up on concrete and pollution, poor nutrition bars and disgusting human food, half-heartedly cooked by someone who'd much rather be drinking. Everything in there, in his home, had smelled of piss and chemicals, a sharp sort of stench that never left, no matter how much his mother occasionally attempted to clean. You can't get away from _filth_ , it clings to you, gets deep inside your bones. It sticks, like a tattoo or the bloody dead. Some things really do rattle around in there like ghosts, he knows by now: the sight of _space_ under the soles of your feet for the first time, the feeling of cracking your dad's nose against your knuckles; the weight of a dozen of your own people holding you down like a mad dog as the bullets hit your goddamn face; the wet softness of someone's lips tracing the scars, many years after they have hardened into steel.

 _Fuck_ this stupid sentimentality.  
  
He swallows the entire drink in one go.  
  
Fuck this goddamn _war_.

“I'm looking for a volus,” he admits as the vodka smooths over the frayed edges of his mind. “Care to help me with that?”  
  


 


	4. We hear the machines

  
  
  
She blinks, trying to crawl back up from the heavy, exhausted sleep. It's still there, under her skin.  
  
The rachni in the shadows, the stench of corruption and old mistakes torn open, a breathless blur of guns firing and twisted creatures screeching and her team, hesitating in front of her, the doubt so visible that she had heard herself shout back at them. _It's an order. She's too valuable an asset to lose now._ They had followed her directives though she hardly thinks they _get_ it. Not even Garrus. Especially not Garrus.   
  
Tuchanka in all its scorched earth-glory, rising beneath their feet, crumbling beneath their feet and above their heads and in all the dark corners beneath, in the unspoken darkness.   
  
_Mordin_.   
  
Wrex pressing forward and then the soil itself that had seemed to respond to their efforts by pushing away the enemy – an enemy that moves far apart from every war they can remember, every conflict in their records and files. An enemy that doesn't let itself be torn apart that easily but every opponent, Shepard knows in every cell of her body, can be chased away. Maybe only for a moment, maybe only in bits and pieces but it's possible. There is _hope_.   
  
When she sits up straight she notices her screen blinks. Eleven unread messages. Five incoming calls. Hackett on the line.   
  
Shepard pushes herself out of bed.  
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
She blinks, trying to adjust her sight to the dark room, her brain to the fleeting fragments of recollections and impressions. Memories. As she groans to herself – something hurts in her ankle, a twisting, sharp kind of pain that she can't even remember the way she doesn't remember much from her body pre-cybernetics – there are flashes of knowledge that snaps into place. One memory. Then another. And a full string of them, completing the picture.   
  
A coup at the Citadel, the last thing she would have expected to being forced to deal with at the moment. Not that it's all that strange given the fact that Cerberus are supremacist assholes working every angle to profit from the ongoing war, but it's still something they didn't prepare for. Nothing they talked about over coffee back when she was locked up by the Alliance.   
  
Turns out, of course, that they had managed even a coup. At least most of them. At least mostly.

  
“Shepard.” Kaidan stands before her all of a sudden and she's confused, for a beat she doesn't remember how he got here, how he got out of hospital and into the Normandy. “You alright?”  
  
She rubs her temples, frowning. She had shot Udina. _Killed_ him and the only thing she recalls from that moment when she pulled the trigger is that it was such a perfect shot. Textbook example, the kind an ageing tutor would rant and rave about to new recruits. _Back when I was your age.._. Kaidan had looked at her with a completely different expression afterwards, she remembers that, too. There had been shades of hesitation – doubt – about her actions but he'd never _not_ have her back, not unless he's morphed into someone else than the man she got to know during the Geth war.   
  
Mayor Alenko reporting for duty on the Normandy. Again. As it should be.   
  
“Always fine, Kaidan.”   
  
A familiar little half-smile crossing his features. “Of course.”   
  
There are probably things they need to talk about. Her crew, her superiors, the two of them; there are a lot of things _everybody_ needs to talk about but for the time being, Shepard just wants to have a shower, a major bowl of coffee and a chat with Liara to run a double-check on survivors outside of their immediate ranks. Lawson, had they heard anything from her? Kasumi, even if Shepard always assumes she's alive and well somewhere in the shadows. Zaeed. She really wants to know if Zaeed has been caught in some galactic cross-fire, wants to know where he _is_.   
  
“There have been too many close-calls lately.” Kaidan's voice drops slightly as he walks up to one of the large windows in one of the lounges. “And I'm still trying to wrap my head around what just happened with Udina.”  
  
“What about it?” Shepard takes a few steps too, leaning against the glass that separates them from the voids and Reapers outside the ship, feeling that low-burning sense of responsibility that separates her from everything else in the galaxy. Her own desires rest safe and sound somewhere outside that glass, out of sight out and of mind. “Talk to me.”  
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
In her nightmares that never end she can barely move. Classic nightmare scenario, of course, except she doesn't know if nightmares are typically about ancient alien races soaring in the sky, making the sound of destruction echo everywhere in their wake. That sound. It grinds its way inside your head, falls into some hollow of your bones where it remains, like an implant that brings no life, only death.   
  
_We hear the machines_ and the sorrow in that voice, that fate.   
  
In her nightmares that never end everything always falls. She stands there, numb with fear and inaction and watches everything fall. And the most frightening part - the one that's a dark stitch in her chest – is how liberating it it, how endlessly, hopelessly _free_ it makes her. Even if she dies, even if they all die.   
  
_We hear the machines._


	5. Clear skies

  
  
  
Shepard leans forward on her elbows, flickering through her datapad as she pokes with one hand in a bowl of some sort of oatmeal. That's what the mess sergeant claims it is at least. At this point, after so many years on the Normandy, carrying out emergency mission after emergency mission with no end in sight, she could probably sacrifice a colony or two for some decent food. Properly cooked, fresh ingredients, some good beer on the side. Meat and potatoes and cheese or candy with soda, she's not picky at this point. _You have the palate of a five year old_ , Anderson had teased her once, when she was a new recruit and needed cheering up.  
  
_Anderson_. There's that bottomless fear in her at the thought of him, the mere mention of his name. Will they even see each other – or Earth - again?  
  
“So Din Korlack is leaking info to Cerberus?” Garrus looks at her across the table in the mess hall.  
  
“That's what the intel C-sec forwarded suggests, yeah.” She isn't sure she believes it, but she's trying to walk through these times with a permanently clear mind as some sort of last attempt at not being lied to and betrayed. “At this point, I'm not ruling out anything.”  
  
“Yeah, makes sense.”  
  
If someone had asked for her opinion on Cerberus ten years ago she would probably have been able to recite something from some N7 training lecture on minor organisations and groups. Probably, no guarantees. These days she could _give_ that damn lecture and she's so sick of hearing the name everywhere she turns, sick of dealing with their bullshit on top of trying to prevent the Reapers total destruction of the galaxy. The whole blindly aggressive agenda, the husks, the unknown, unmentionable resources they seem to preside over and with every such thought, she can almost imagine the tech inside her countering her negativity. _Tick, tock, your time is up. The fight you can't win. We own you.  
  
_ “He's always been a rude bastard,” she says, reaching for her coffee. “That doesn't make you a Cerberus spy, though. We'll thread carefully here. A lot of things at play.”  
  
Garrus nods, simply.  
  
He's been a comfort lately. That's what their relationship has evolved into, after two long tours through the galaxy together. They had both been different people from the start, some edges to polish and experience to gain and that string of conflicts and conclusions that make you something more than a good soldier or officer, that makes you stand out. _Couldn't have done it without you, Vakarian_ , she thinks now when she looks at him. It's not exactly true – these clichés never are – but it's not a lie either; the bonds you forge, the people you tie yourself to, they do matter. In the end, those bonds are the only things that do. _  
  
_ While she hasn't yet picked him up on his offer to outdrink her some night if she needs a distraction, she can definitely see it happening in a near future. Maybe they should bring Kaidan, too. Or Zaeed. If she manages to find that wretched man in the midst of a burning war, she will definitely bring him to a bar and make him tell some of his long-winded stories that seem to never have an end, but still somehow manages to not be boring. Unlike most people she knows, at least he's never boring. Wasn't that what he had said about her, once? _You don't bore me, Shepard.  
  
_ The bonds. They really do matter. _  
  
“_ Kasumi checked in with T'Soni earlier, right?” Garrus finishes his own food – that looks more edible than Shepard's – and leans back in his seat.  
  
“Right. Last night. Or, well, sometime before I slept.” She smiles a little. Time blurs; they're officially on the same schedule as the Normandy has always been but with everything's that's happened and keeps happening, it's not like they have a strict line between night and day any more. You eat, sleep and work regardless.  
  
“Not that I was worried. She could sneak out of a Reaper if she had to.”  
  
“Let's not test that theory.”  
  
He gives a little snort that sounds like laughter, before falling silent for a beat. “What about Lawson? Zaeed?”  
  
There's a shift in his voice at the last name and Shepard feels it in her gut. _  
  
_ “Not a word,” she admits thought part of her feels like she shouldn't, like they ought to adopt a new policy that states that things they never mention in words are just _fine_ or don't even exist. Don't ask, don't tell, don't _jinx_. “But we're having serious comm link issues.”  
  
Garrus nods. “Getting worse, too.”  
  
There's a torrent of voices coming from outside the elevator, suggesting a new crowd has arrived for their meal. Shepard rakes a hand through her hair, glancing at the datapad again. No new notifications.  
  
“Zaeed's probably retired from the Reapers,” Garrus offers as he catches her gaze again. “Bought his own planet. A moon somewhere.”  
  
She has to chuckle at the image – which isn't too difficult to conjure up either - of Zaeed having a whole world to himself. It would consist of booze, cigarette, the kind of crappy vids he likes to watch and the strategy games he thinks she hasn't noticed he plays on his omni-tool during downtime. No _goddamn_ _idiots_ in sight on that planet, that's for sure. Makes her wonder if she'd qualify for a visit herself. Probably not.  
  
And amusing mental images aside it's hard to see him giving up now. He's not one for leisure, he might know more about it than she does but that doesn't say much. And it's that fuel inside him – hot passion burnt to bitterness – that makes her _miss_ him in a way she thought she never would.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
He has weird fucking dreams lately.  
  
Not that nightmares are anything new in his life – he's learned some tricks to avoid them, found that vodka works best – but there's a difference now. Ever since the Reapers, ever since that goddamn footage from Earth, hell ever since he first shook Shepard's hand on Omega, it's been _different_. The shit he's seen have torn his mind apart at the edges. Figures, of course, that he'd finally go mad in the end. His mother sure had. Except he'll finish himself off once he's started going downhill, not wait it out like his mum, sit in a dump of a flat somewhere with the blinds down and just wait. For what, he had never understood. Better times, Zaeed. No, a bullet in his head – the good side, the one that isn't stitched together with a billion little pieces of metal – will do.  
  
Zaeed dreams of Vido now. Dreams of his mother, his father, of random bastards he's met along the way. Shireen. He dreams of her, too. In his dreams she's still young and stupid but tough like nails and funny as hell, always making him laugh. Now, in his twisted dream version, she dies like a dog with the rest of them, right before his eyes.  
  
He dreams of Shepard - her mouth curled into one of those rare grins, teeth flashing in the darkness – but always wakes up before she's fallen onto the pile of corpses.  
  
“You're looking for someone,” Rahida tells him – she doesn't ask questions, seems to think she's too smart for it, that she's got everybody pegged down – as they're preparing to head out of her little ship.  
  
Zaeed double-checks the state of the ammo in his rifle. “Yeah, Volus ambassador. Ugly guy. Remember?”  
  
“Someone _else_ ,” she clarifies, like it hadn't been obvious before. “Someone you're not going to shoot or sell out for cash.”  
  
_You're mistaking me for Vido, you bastard._  
  
“What makes you so sure about that.” He accidentally runs his hand across the wall to his right and grimaces at the stains it brings. This little vessel thinks of unwashed surfaces and dirty floors; Rahida doesn't clean and Zaeed isn't bloody likely to, either. He pays good money to travel with her, the greedy bitch. He thinks, for a second, about the Normandy and all the comforts of that beast of a ship. Goddamn _beauty_.  
  
“I just am.” Rahida shrugs. “I see it in your face.”  
  
He scoffs. “That's scar tissue, sweetheart.”  
  
His new and likely very temporary companion shakes her head, says nothing more for a long while. Not until she's packed all of her stuff and stands ready in front of him.  
  
“You ready, Massani?”  
  
“I'm always ready.”  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
And then, on an unusually clear channel at the Citadel, she hears Zaeed's voice for the first time in forever and it lands with a blow in her chest.  


 


	6. These old bones of war

 

 

”So it's _her_ , is it?” Rahida's voice is smug, cool like the metal walls against the back of his head as they recuperate and wait for the goddamn cavalry to arrive; cool and annoying like the echo of bullets that pierce your skull again and again in the middle of the night. This entire woman is like a bad nightmare. Or maybe he's being an unfair arsehole again, it's been known to happen.

“The hell are you talking about?”

She still has one of her pistols drawn – not one to take Zaeed's word for anything – but her posture is relaxed, almost arrogant. Moments like these she reminds him of Shepard and that insight swirls around, refusing to land.

“The one you're looking for, Massani.”

There's no denying he had been all instincts and rash decisions the second he understood Shepard was involved in this stupid goddamn mission, the second he realised he had crossed paths with her more or less by accident. _Yeah, right, you mad old dog._ There's no denying that he had felt – that he _feels_ – a sort of trust that he'd much rather not acknowledge, at least not at his age, with his arsenal of experience. Makes everything so bloody complicated.

Rahida's gaze on him is heavy; he shrugs.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” A grim grin flashes on her face for a half second. “So I guess this is where I leave you.”

She wants nothing to do with the Alliance, he can understand it very well. That itch to leave before you step into a mess that's more than you bargained for, the urge to just grab your reward and fuck off. Even if the stupid volus isn't very vocal at the moment, Zaeed knows they'll both get a fair amount of credits for saving his fat arse. People like him are always terrified of dying, could very well offer their own children if it gets them out of trouble. Rahida will get her payment.

Zaeed rubs a sore spot on his neck as he looks through the window, down the Citadel-shiny corridor. Screens flashing their ads everywhere, like nothing has happened. If it weren't for the Alliance bastards spewing their occasional propaganda – Admiral Hackett wants you – no one would even guess the whole galaxy was under goddamn Reaper attack. Stupid fucking movies nobody wants to see, fragrances nobody will have time to wear before they're blown up, hotels that might not even survive the upcoming cycle. Then again, maybe that's what he would have done if he hadn't been leaping across the skies with a rifle since he was too young to know better. Maybe that's what he would have ended up doing – celebrating the end of the world by going to a hotel in distant nebula, closing his eyes and hoping he'd die quick, at least.

It's different if you're a fighter. Doesn't matter what _kind_ of fighter you are, he can see the same determination in the eyes of every scumbag he comes across these days, in every waste of space that should be in a cell somewhere or dead a long time ago. That stubborn idiocy: _you won't take me alive._

“Steer clear of the Reapers,” he says and Rahida chuckles darkly.

“You were good company, Massani. Even if you're an idiot.”

As she walks away, the volus makes a noise that sounds like muffled laughter.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  


 

The relief is like a warm, quick blow. A punch in the chest, a twist to her stomach.

His gaze on her is steady as she enters the room, keeping her arms folded across her chest for the last few steps up to him; he looks tired, she feels exhausted and yet they are both the lucky ones. That knowledge is a weariness in itself, tingling inside her veins. Still, it's good to see him. More than that, much _more_ but boiling beneath the surface and she shakes it off.

"It's been a while, Zaeed." She can't stop a grin from appearing on her face, nonetheless.

"Shepard." And there's a hitch in his tone, a shadow of something. "Glad I was wasn't making an ass of myself over a hunch."

Din Korlack moves about in the opposite corner of the room, still looking shell-shocked and disoriented. Ordinarily she would probably be by his side right now, making sure he was okay. But the Cerberus involvement holds her back, part of her hoping recent events nag and burn inside him. Instead she turns back to Zaeed.   
  
“You've kept yourself busy.”

"Yeah." He glares at the guard corpses on the floor. "Goddamn Cerberus bastards keep popping up. Been tracking those fuckers for a while now."

"I figured the Illusive Man would want to keep you," she says, because she had always figured he never really understood Zaeed enough to realise that it wasn't going to happen. Shepard understands him better, understands that you don't work up a reputation as one of the best mercs in the galaxy only to accept jobs from a class A bully with shady prospects. That's just idiotic and Zaeed's not an idiot.

"Wanted me to track the rest of you down," he says, almost on cue. "Wasn't going to happen."

She allows her gaze to linger for a bit, take him in properly. "And the retirement plan?"

He gives her an unreadable glance at that, something shifting beneath the neutral look in his eyes. There is nothing neutral about him in her memory and Shepard struggles with it now, those images of him, of them. If anything it had been more _intense_ than she had pictured it, much more urgent than she would have thought, as though her body had acted on its own, as though the whole ridiculous situation around them had crashed into it all, wrecked them together with brute force. They had tried to make light of it, did their best to tease and play, but the echo in her afterwards, the heavy imprint of his body against hers, tells a different story. One she isn't sure she wants to know.

Zaeed makes a disgruntled noise. "Yeah, not much of a retirement if the Reapers are going to zap me into one of those fucking pods."

Shepard rakes a hand through her hair; it smells faintly of disinfectants and chemicals. Normandy-clean. "I'm working on that," she says, realising when the words leave her mouth that they come out as sighs, a whole chain of them.

There's a wry smile in the corners of Zaeed's mouth. "Of course you are."

She stands beside him in silence for a while, watching the scene. Zaeed squares his shoulders; she can feel his body heat against her arm, a soft gust of _presence_.

These past few months have been a jumbled mess of terror and utter relief at seeing familiar faces, hearing well-known voices nearby again after the shitty stay with the Alliance, far from the places where she could have made a difference. She had felt it at the first sight of Alenko at the Citadel, felt it as Liara had joined her again, as they had found Garrus, _Chakwas_ , hell even a few low-ranking crewmen she's pretty sure she'd never be able to remember the names of but they had been there, they had called her Lieutenant Commander Shepard without hesitation and sworn their loyalty to her cause.

She felt it the moment she heard his voice again, a tremble through the room.

She wonders briefly what she would have done if they had been different people. If she would have looked at him differently, if she would have touched him. A hand on his arm, maybe, a semi-possessive gesture for everyone to see. But you hardly do that to someone you sleep with on some kind of _dare_ , someone you fucked because you both wanted to prove a point or satisfy an urge you refuse to find words for.

"It's good to see you," she says before she has time to regret it, because she has words for _that_. "What are you really doing here?"

He seems to think about his answer for a moment. "Later," he says then, and the relief takes another turn inside. "C-sec is on their way, won't be too pleased with the mess we've made. That dull son of a bitch in command doesn't like me half as much as he fancies you. Catch up with me at the docks if you like."

  
  


* * *

 

  
  
Of course Shepard would make the goddamn Alliance uniform look good, Zaeed thinks to himself later as he watches her make her way through the hordes and scattered groups of refugees held up down here. Blue with golden fucking stripes, all proper military code and he wants to tear it off, for more reasons than he cares to count. She looks disturbingly goddamn sexy in it, for one thing. That's enough for him.   
  
The batarians nearby glare as she approaches – he's watching them carefully, wants to make sure they're not up to some stupid shit he can prevent – but she doesn't even blink.   
  
When she's spotted him she stops, nods a little. 

Zaeed gives her a nod back. "Wondered if you'd show up, Shepard. Figured you'd be too busy."

Leaning against the wall opposite him, she folds her arms. “I can always use more help.”

“I bet. I've seen footage of what happened. On Earth.” He doesn't say what it had done to him, doesn't have to. It does the same to everyone, he can hear it in the noise among the people here, in every overheard conversation, every exhausted argument, every _scream_. “Tell you what, I'll see if some old contacts of mine are still around. Can't promise you anything but if half of them are still breathing I can lend a hand.”

She flashes him a wry grin. "Good enough for me."  
  
Last time he saw her she had been asleep in a hard and heavy kind of way, making her oblivious to everything around her. If he's honest he can still see her, spread out on her stomach with one pillow over her head as though it would block out the rest of the goddamn galaxy. He had hesitated before he left, had looked over his shoulder and thought _fuck this bullshit, I'll hang around_ but in the end, of course, he hadn't. A lot of shitty things can be said about him but he's not a delusional bastard.

“So,” he says, glancing at her and those distracting stripes on her shoulder. _Yes, ma'am, loud and clear ma'am._ “Word on the street is that you shot Udina.”  
  
For a second Shepard looks annoyed, then she lowers her shoulders and shakes her head slightly, a familiar expression appearing behind the mask of code and protocol. Her own face. He knows it well, maybe better than most.  
  
“It's been one hell of a roller-coaster since I was reinstated. You wouldn't believe half of it.”  
  
“Yeah? Try me. It's not like I have anything better to do down here.”  
  
A low chuckle. “Story of your life, Zaeed.”  
  
  
  
  
  



	7. Routines

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've made it one of my Fannish Autumn Goals to finish this story, so here's hoping I do it, too!

  
The days pile up, one by one.

He can't help but think of it as a countdown.

And like everything else, this horror eventually becomes routine, too. Waiting for nothing among thousands of others, eating shitty meals in the cold light of some neon board and sharing a bottle of some fake-Turian piss vodka with random strangers to get through the nights. It melts into your system, all of it. Everything always does. After a while the edges come off and the random strangers aren't random, not  _ strangers  _ either for that matter and Zaeed can't say if it's for better or for worse. Maybe it doesn't matter. It just makes them a whole little nebula of desperate beings clinging to life because the other options are too scary to consider. Survival by routine.

Shepard, too, becomes a routine again as she slips into the layers of his existence once more. This time it's faster, takes so goddamn little effort that he starts to question his own sanity every time he takes notice of the time or watches the news channels. He's not part of the fight now, not taking orders from her but in a way it's like most of them do.

She checks in with them as soon as she gets back to the Citadel; she checks in and makes it seem like something she barely registers that she does: a visit in passing, on her way somewhere else. But he knows her better than that by now, knows that she considers herself the commander of every pathetic bastard in this place and has taken upon herself to protect them all, see this war through even if all she can do is to count them like sheep. Even the batarians, he suspects, though she may count them for different reasons.

"Here," she says today and holds out a small package of something - probably food, she often brings them leftovers from the Normandy kitchen. Best tasteless crap in the galaxy.

Zaeed takes it and holds it up, not feeling particularly hungry at the sight of the tightly packed Alliance ration meal, but he knows he'll devour it anyway. War hollows you out from the inside.

"Checked in with Jack," she continues when he doesn't say anything. "They're doing pretty well, all things considered."

"Yeah, not surprising." He still remembers the biotic in action, how the air around her would soar with energy and her body, always on the verge of something, would shiver. Lots of biotics around - Shepard's one, but she's too much of a soldier to put it on display - but not everyone practically  _ stinks  _ of it the way Jack does. “What about you?”

For a second she looks surprised.

“ I’m tired,” she confesses then, voice low over the noise that surrounds them. “So damn exhausted.”

“ Yeah. Figures.”

It’s different this time. For all of them. Different because they don’t count on survival, don’t count on seeing the end of anything in particular and without that, war is  _ endless _ . It’s a darkness in your goddamn blood to think of it that way, Zaeed knows that better than the majority of the fresh-faced idiots parading around in their Alliance armor. A sickness, a shadow that grows until you’re swallowed by it.

Shepard takes a step back as a group of turians rush forward and throws a stray glance their way.

People on the move all around them. On the move but goddamn  _ trapped _ , like insects in this giant jar, running about to pretend they’re on their way somewhere. He changes position, squares his shoulders. Ever since the cybernetic eye started acting up, he’s been tense and uncomfortable, as if his wrecked old body is trying to fall apart right in the middle of this war. And wouldn’t that just be his luck? Survive every fucking suicide run in the galaxy only to be bested by medical implants.

“ Oh, and I’ve made an appointment for you at Huerta Memorial,” Shepard states flatly, uncannily in tune with his thoughts. Soldier hive mind, maybe that’s something that happens in a crisis - everyone starts thinking of themselves as part of a unit that needs to function. “Your eye,” she clarifies, as though Zaeed wouldn’t know. “You’re an ally and I need my allies fully functional.”

His mouth opens, then closes again. He’s really not going to find a good retort for that one. Shepard, judging by her expression, doesn’t expect one either; she leans back against one of the flashing ads - _Delta 45, smoothest fragrance in the galaxy_ \- and looks out over the poor sods lining up and scattering again.

They’d stand like this on the Normandy, too: mostly silent or rambling on and on about useless old missions or people they once knew, sharing grievances and gossip; occasionally he’d make her listen to a war story or two, telling her about daring escapes until he’d bore even himself. Shepard would pick up some unimportant task to complete on her omni-tool or datapad to make herself feel useful and then, like that, those critical hours in transit would have passed. _Thank you, Massani_ , she had said that last night on the ship, her face turned away from him in bed. _For keeping me sane through all of this._ _Much appreciated._

Zaeed hadn’t managed to come up with a good retort for that, either. For a long while it had served as a last conversation between them, a  _ goodbye  _ but she has returned now, she’s  _ here _ , and he scratches the back of his head, wondering if he’ll manage to figure her out before the Reapers turn him into a husk.

Doesn’t seem bloody likely.   
  


 

* * *

 

  
  


The days pile up one by one.

She's pretty sure it's a countdown.

Action seems to happen in cycles, here. Some days it’s still mostly paperwork and research, tracking signals and decoding messages, trying to put together a plan that will sustain them all and ignore the creeping terror of having too  _ little  _ to do. Some days it’s jumping straight into the fire and keep your fingers crossed. Today is a quiet day; to keep herself from thinking about the million uncanny reasons for it she walks the Silversun Strip until her head aches from the bright colours, buys unnecessary mods for her pistol and three servings of sushi. One she inhales standing up, making a mental note to remember to snack more often. The last two she brings with her as she stops by to see Zaeed. He’s sitting at the makeshift bar - that runs counter to all Citadel regs but nobody cares enough to cause trouble,  _ she _ least of all - in the arrival hall today.

“ Sushi, Shepard?” He raises an eyebrow.

Shrugging, she jumps up to sit on a high, uncomfortable chair where she can overlook the batarian refugees. There’s something to be said for having routines even during times like these and her routines are food, doing her rounds, more food and then working away at something until her eyes snap shut without effort.

“Look, today it’s either having sushi with you or having to answer EDI’s questions about sexuality and romance.” Zaeed gives her an incredulous look that makes her smile. She doesn’t feel the need to add that EDI’s questions border on difficult to answer because Shepard is a hopeless case, despite that ‘firsthand sexual experience’ EDI thinks qualifies you for a lot of things. “ _Please_ don’t ask.”

“ Wasn’t goddamn going to.” He grabs the box of food. Neither of them ever mention why she brings food to people with enough credits to buy their own; Shepard’s unsure what the answer would be.  _ Your well-concealed nurturing instincts _ , Tali had teased her before the Omega relay.  _ A mother to her crew.  _ That’s probably bullshit, but you never know.

She leans back on her hands, feeling unusually calm - all things considered. She’s not hungry, she’s warm, Liara assures her the scientists working at the Crucible has made some breakthroughs, Shepard herself has had a bunch of promising leads and she’s reasonably satisfied with the results of recent missions.

"So you and the Alliance poster boy, huh?" Zaeed drops the question like a statement, blunt and neutral as though he’s commenting on the temperature levels on the Citadel.

“ Uh.” Shepard gulps down a large bite of soy-soaked rice. " _ What _ ?"

He doesn’t look at her. “Saw you have lunch yesterday. That journalist you keep around came to me afterwards, asked all sorts of questions. Daft bitch.”

Allers.  _ Damn  _ her. She’d go all in for the ‘hope during dark times’-angle, Shepard’s sure of it. Footage of how the famous Alliance brass find moments together to partake in ill-advised, reg-breaking romance. Suddenly the contentment from before has vanished and Shepard’s sighing, raking fingers through her hair.

“ The major and I had lunch, yeah.”

_ This is a lunch too _ , she thinks but doesn’t really care to say because the implications of that wriggle around enough inside as it is. 

“ The hell did you let a reporter board the goddamn Normandy for?” He eyes her curiously, but there’s something else there in his gaze, a shade of something darker that she can’t reach. Answers to questions he isn’t posing are lingering at the back of her tongue but he isn’t asking and she’s too tired for games.

“ Honestly, I don’t know.” She shrugs. The last two pieces of sushi remain uneaten in her box; she feels oddly full. “Figured it could hardly make things worse.”  
  
Zaeed gives a bark of incredulous laughter and she feels a brief flash of irritation. It’s not like anyone asks  _ him  _ to guard the galaxy against an ancient threat and make all kinds of quick decisions on his feet. What she wouldn’t give to switch positions with him sometimes. To be that seasoned old merc in the outskirts, observing the chaos and dropping casual remarks about it. _ Yeah, because calmly observing as the shit hits the fan is really your thing, Shepard.  _ __  
  
“Didn’t tell her anything, though,” he adds, sounding like he’s expecting her to thank him for it.    
  
“There’s nothing to tell.” She gets to her feet as a low beep indicates there’s a message waiting at her private terminal.    
  
Zaeed remains where he is, watching her. “Whatever you say, Shepard.”   
  
She’s not sure he sounds convinced; she doesn’t have time to find out if he is. 


	8. Unhappy dancing

  
  
It’s ironic that he finally has enough credits to his name to lead a life of pointless luxury - only to live in a galaxy that’s blowing itself up.  
  
As a kid, he’d sometimes steal food from the trashiest places in town - low security, low risk - when his mum had spent all her salary on booze or illegal substances to help her sleep. Later he’d steal for the hell of it and because he damn well didn’t want to waste everything he owned on steaks and booze. Long time ago now, completely different life and these days he’s got more money than he’ll have the opportunity to waste before time runs out for them all.  
  
A typical day at the Citadel he tries to purchase ammo and guns, spends ridiculous amounts at various vendors and traders, sometimes he makes a detour to the arcades at the Silversun strip. At some point in his life he might have considered making an investment, save for the future, but there's no use for that kind of long-term planning now. If he walks out of this alive without being turned into a husk, he can probably get whatever shipwreck or half-ruined waterfront home in the galaxy almost for free. That’s got to be the upsides to surviving Armageddon, he reckons.  
  
The downsides are pretty much everything else.  
  
Like goddamn batarians everywhere.  
  
Today he’s keeping an eye on one of them - suspicious bastard, even without the batarian thing. Citadel networks may not be working at optimal speed during the war but even so, Zaeed has managed to figure out the identity.  
  
Balak.  
  
He remembers Shepard telling him about her run-in with some batarian terrorist, remembers he’d wanted to blow up a goddamn moon over a colony, remembers she had pulled a stunt and averted the crisis but let the terrorist leader get away. _I’m not a thug, Massani_ , she had said when he questioned her sanity.  
  
Thug or not, there are a lot of people who could use a bullet through their brain and this Balak definitely qualifies for that list.  
  
Zaeed spots Shepard before the batarian does, this time. Spots her as she’s on her way to check on something by the memorial wall the refugees have set up here, a pointless goddamn collection of people missing, as if placing a photo of them there will make them any less dead. He _gets_ sentimentality - gets it a hell of lot more than most people would realise - but bawling in front of a wall with names brings nobody any release.  
  
Shepard’s not there to mourn, though. Neither is Balak. Zaeed keeps his distance to them both, breath hitched in his chest and one hand cradling his rifle.  
  
In the end, however, there’s no big drama. The batarian points a gun at her - Zaeed is ten feet away, weapon drawn; he doesn’t goddamn _blink_ .  
  
“You okay, Commander?” Officer Noles asks, loud enough for Zaeed to pick it up. As if officers like Noles she had something to do with Balak leaving the scene, as if officers like Noles have  _anything_ to do with the security around this dump.  
  
What Shepard says in response he doesn’t know, but once the C-Sec chivalry has stomped off again to be useless somewhere else, she nods at Zaeed.  
  
He feels caught, puts the rifle away and shrugs. “Friend of yours, Shepard?”  
  
“Not remotely.” She throws a long glance at the escaping batarian; her face is calm, there’s something almost sad in her eyes. “But I ended up with the remains of the batarian fleet on my side.”  
  
_Our_ side, he thinks but keeps quiet about it.  
  
“Hey,” he says instead. “I think the mistress of Omega is looking for you. Heard some rumours.”  
  
Now she frowns. “Mistress of- oh, right. She’ll have to wait a while, I’ve got plans.”  
  
Ever since he found her again, Zaeed’s had this weird feeling that he’s wasting time around her, that they’re doing pointless bullshit instead of… he has no idea what. Fucking each other’s brains out aboard the Normandy, probably. He wouldn’t say no to that. But it’s more, it’s _worse_ . It’s the goddamn quietude with her he wants, he realises now as she’s around. The in-transit peace. Off-duty hours when nobody’s watching and even someone like him can feel at ease, can be unobserved, _unguarded_ .  
  
Clearing his throat, Zaeed watches as Shepard, too, takes her leave.  
  
“No more snuggling with batarians, I hope,” he calls after her.  
  
She turns around slightly and there’s a smile there now, one he briefly recognises with a jolt of fire running down his spine. It’s the same smile - more of a grin - that she had on her face after the Omega-4 relay, that brief moment when they had allowed themselves and each other to be victorious even as they began preparing for their next war.  
  
“Promise.”  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
She blames Jack.  
  
As the weird lights in the bedroom that turns out not to be a bedroom at all reaches into Shepard’s dreams and she opens her eyes, reluctantly, she _really_ blames Jack.  
  
A couch. She’s slept on a couch.  
  
Commander Shepard, Alliance Navy and first human Spectre has slept on a couch in the Purgatory.  
  
Shepard’s original plan had been straightforward enough - meet with an ally for a quick check-in and a drink, coordinate their mutual war efforts face to face. Nothing wrong with that. These days no one can accuse Subject Zero of not taking herself or her mission seriously either - as Shepard walked into Purgatory, Jack had been readying duty rosters. _Suits you_ , Shepard had joked though they both knew she means it, knows she genuinely cares because like Jack, she just can’t seem to help it.  
  
And then somehow Shepard had ended up having more drinks with Joker, and with EDI and, if her tormented brain remembers correctly, a bunch of Asari mercs. _Why?_  
  
“Headache, Shepard?” Aria’s voice is dry and it brings back a flood of memories of last night. There had been vague but somehow also _distinct_ talk of Omega. Deals had been made. Or if it was a dare, she’s not goddamn sure and it doesn’t matter because she had agreed to terms with someone who definitely won't forget. Ships, men, plenty of ezo for the war; all of these are good things and even more tempting, apparently, when she’s blind drunk on vodka. Except - and this recollection makes her wish she could go back in time - she had agreed to come alone, without her crew. Now is _really_ not the time for another solo stunt (she can practically hear Hackett and Anderson doing a synchronized yelling routine in her head) and she’s setting herself up for trouble.  
  
She blames Jack, but it’s a weak, hopeless sort of blame. This is on her.  
  
The entire damn war is on her.  
  
Shepard groans loudly into her palm before straightening up.  
  
“Nah,” she says. They both know she’s a horrible liar.  
  
As she walks out of Purgatory she checks her messages from last night and notices a new one that almost makes her grin to herself:  
  
_See you on Omega. Aria pays a hell of a lot better than you, by the way. /Z_


	9. Guest of honor

  
  
  
The moment she steps out of her crashed escape pod on Omega, Shepard can tell that calling the place a ground war is no exaggeration.  
  
Not that Shepard had expected Aria to exaggerate - she’s not the type - but she had been prepared for the discovery that she’d be dragged needlessly into something that would only turn out to matter for Aria personally. That would certainly not be the first time.  
  
This is bigger, she can tell from the get go. Personal, sure, but _big_ .  
  
The strength and sheer mass of the Cerberus forces is overwhelming for a split second, overwhelming and infuriating in equal measures because this is one of the things that _gets_ to her, hits bone-deep. This in-fighting in the middle of all the intergalactic conflict, ridiculous posturing and struggles for dominance when the galaxy bleeds out around them. It’s a fucking waste of resources, time and _lives_ and it makes her hatred for the Illusive Man burn even hotter in her chest, makes her want to tear him apart and sprinkle him across the Terminus system. Of course, he’d probably find some way to cybernetically bounce back from that, too.    
  
Omega, as always, is a display of everything that is fucked up in the galaxy.  
  
Gang wars, drugs, lawlessness and pragmatic capitalism, all shoved into one stinking rock.  
  
_Your little war against the other gangs left a vacuum_ , Aria states in her very recent memory and Shepard cradles her pistol harder as she moves through the filth around them.  
  
She checks her omni-tool at every turn, scanning it for comm chatter and for the secure channel she’s set up with Zaeed. It’s not failsafe but close enough in wartimes and it’s a steady, reassuring reminder that he’s alive. In another channel, Nyreen and the others on her team give brief reports of their situation - which is steadily awful but manageable.  
  
_Piling up dead Talons_ , Zaeed writes as Shepard slips into a back alley that, at least at first glance, seems empty and without much of a security system. _Incoming Cerberus._  
  
And then the channel dies.    


* * *

  
  
  
  
It’s been a decent run here on Omega but he’s beyond tired of vorcha shouting left and right and of wasting perfectly good ammo on them. Stupid beasts.  
  
Part of him doesn’t even understand what the hell they’re _doing_ here when there are Reapers roaming the solar systems but that goes for a lot of missions lately. Or, if he’s going to be honest, for most of his career as a merc. A lot of rage and fury signifying goddamn nothing.  
  
At least the woman beside him in this car can add plenty of big accomplishments to her list of thug jobs. Not that he’s jealous about the shouldering the fate of the galaxy thing.  
  
“And here I thought I was finally getting to see your ship, Zaeed.”  
  
Shepard glances sideways at him from the passenger seat, her arms crossed. It must fucking _kill_ her not to be the driver, he thinks and almost laughs out loud. How many goddamn times has she put her crew - and likely friends, too, if she has any outside of the Normandy - through mortal danger with her lack of driving skills? He’s even heard her pull rank if someone has objected. They have. She drives recklessly, too fast and too sloppy in addition to being completely unaware of her own shortcomings as a driver and he can’t decide if it’s sexy or annoying as hell. Probably a bit of both.  
  
And now here she is, still recovering from the last fight, patched-up and visibly restless.  
  
“Yeah, didn’t want to get it blown to shit. Hitchhiked with a bunch of mercs.”  
  
He had found her by the cabs, trying to hijack a parked and semi-wrecked car while waiting for him to get to the coordinate she had sent. That’s how they’ve been communicating on Omega - brief messages containing mostly numbers and positions and Zaeed’s barely even checked them properly, just the sight of the notification has been offering him all the info he needs.  
  
Shepard is alive. Omega hasn’t killed her this time around either. Somehow that’s become a main concern for him and he’s too fucking tired of all the other shit to pretend that isn’t the case.  
  
She makes a clucking sound as he steers them away from some flying debris and avoids scraping the side of the car against the walls of a tunnel.  
  
Zaeed looks at her. “What?”  
  
“You’re a good driver, that’s all. I’d _never_ have pegged you for a good driver.”  
  
He scoffs. “You’re damn well not one to talk, Shepard.”  
  
There’s a chuckle from the passenger seat. “Can you blame me? All I ever hear from you are stories about how you wrecked a ship and survived while everything else on it burned to ashes.”  
  
“Yeah?” Three crashed cars at the end of the tunnel, one of them burning; Zaeed makes a sharp turn to the left to avoid the flames.  
  
“Yeah.” She stretches out a little in her seat, grimacing as her beaten-up body moves around. “Wouldn’t have thought you could fly a cargo ship without getting it blown up.”  
  
“Well that would depend on the ship’s goddamn cargo, wouldn’t it?”  
  
With her there’s always this lingering and _infuriating_ notion of not measuring up to whatever scales she’s holding, of not responding to certain events according to the secret protocol she’s checking him against and Zaeed feels it like a sour taste in his mouth. Not that he doesn’t deserve the doubts because fuck, he does; the frustration travels inward, scraping against his own history.  
  
“I suppose.” Her voice is different now, soft like the gaze aimed at him.  
  
“Anything else you hadn’t expected me to be good at?” he ventures. “While we’re at it?”  
  
Shepard’s low laughter at his question makes his head spin.  
  
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”  
  
“Wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”  
  
They’re both silent until they reach the shuttles and Zaeed parks the car - without much care - near the departing ones. He holds out one hand to her and she looks at him for a beat - or two, or three, the moment stretching out endlessly - before taking it; she gets to her feet gracelessly, one arm pressed against her injured side. There’s a streak of something unsettled in him when she lets go of his support. A nagging worry, perhaps, or he’s having a goddamn heart attack. Hard to tell, these days.   
  
“Your channel went dead for a while,” Shepard says then, sounding almost reluctant, as if she’s dragging the words out of herself. “Thought you were, too. Glad you’re not, Zaeed.”  
  
The wounded and dead are all gathered by the shuttles when they reach them, a morbid fucking scene of the various stages of bodily decay and there’s a brief flash of relief in him as it sinks in that they’re walking out of it unscated. Relief and confusion at the goddamn _novelty_ of feeling that way, of adding that flaw to the equation. You don’t become a great bounty hunter - or a war mongering commander - if you’re afraid to die and he hasn’t been, for so many years he doesn’t want to count them.  
  
Still isn’t, not exactly, but the seed of it is definitely there.  
  
“Hey, Shepard?”  
  
She’s about to board a pod back to one of Aria’s ships; she throws him a glance over the crowd when he calls out for her.  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“You never answered my question.” He folds his arms across his chest.  
  
There’s a grin there, playing in the corners of her mouth. He can spot it even from where he stands.  
  
“I did.”


	10. Despoina

  
  
“You did _what_ , Commander?” Chakwas eyebrows are arched and her voice slightly pitched as she stares at Shepard over the rim of her glass.   
  
“I went below the ocean,” Shepard takes a mouthful of Serrice ice brandy and crosses her legs as she repeats her story to her audience of one. This time she leaves out the long search and investigation from the tale, however, figuring that Chakwas already knows most of it from talking to Bryson. “And found creatures older than the Reapers.”    
  
“But that is… I don’t even _know_ what that is.”  
  
“Yeah,” Shepard agrees. “Me neither. But I think it went well.”  
  
“What does that mean in a situation like this? What is ‘well’ to you, Commander?” she sounds genuinely intrigued and equally confused by the word choice.   
  
The question actually give her some pause, Shepard realizes. She lets her gaze sweep over the massive panorama window overlooking the Citadel and sends a quiet thank you to Anderson who has, more or less, given her this place to consider her own. A needless luxury in any other time but wartime when everything that can put your mind at ease is a welcome addition to your existence. Anderson of all people ought to know. And he does, judging by this.   
  
The Leviathans had been an off-course distraction in some ways, no doubt about it. Their resources are stretched thin and time is everything when you’re about to run out of it but Admiral Hackett had endorsed the investigation in the first place and if there’s someone’s judgment she trusts it’s got to be his. _His judgement didn’t get you out of the brig, though, eh?_   
  
It had been a strange, overwhelming sort of objective from start to finish.   
  
It had also been the kind of mission you don’t want to sit through, the kind of mission where the risks involved would make you frantic unless you’re the one maneuvering through them. Even as she sank to the depths and beyond she had been thinking how glad she was not to be the one back on the ground, counting the minutes and preparing to launch a plan B.   
  
“That we survived,” she replies eventually. “All of us. And managed to secure both some invaluable data and gain a little advantage for the battle with the Reapers. How’s that for ‘well’?”  
  
“Sounds good to me.” Chakwas nods, raising her glass once more. “To you.”  
  
“To _us_ ,” Shepard says, that flickering worry in her throat again whenever they approach sentimental territory. Every conversation about her team or the Alliance in general (nevermind that she’s been furious with them for the past year or so, thinking them a _pain_ and, in Zaeed’s words occasionally even a _goddamn joke_ ) hits a nerve these days, like pinpricks to her very heart. It’s entirely possible that she’s more or less made for war, but she’s not made for the damn apocalypse. It renders her sappy, anxious, unable to think straight. Some people, like Liara, claims the apocalypse does that to everyone but not everyone needs to navigate through it with a clear head.    
  
A _mostly_ clear head. Shepard finishes the drink, thinking she is more than allowed to momentarily go all dizzy on them.   
  
“Another one, Commander?” Chakwas asks because if there’s one thing the Normandy medic understands better than most, Shepard has come to learn, it’s the importance of a good drinking session.   


“Always.”   
  
With a new drink in her hand, Shepard sinks back in her comfortable seat, putting up her feet on the table in front of them. Tonight feels, in every aspect, like a slice that’s been cut out of the fabric of time. A respite, a time-out from war and destruction and death. Even if her channels are never shut down or even set to mute, they feel more distant here, away from the Normandy and the crew. This, too, is one of the benefits of this place - it carries a kind of rest she hasn’t felt since she first stepped out groundside on Eden Prime.    
  
And Chakwas - who wants to go by  _ Karin  _ now that they’re friends, but Shepard has always had trouble switching to less formal names in her head and keeps stumbling - brings a sense of safety, too, sappy as it may sound. It’s the fact that she’s been around for this whole ride, has seen her with and without Cerberus cybernetics and with and without the galaxy resting on her shoulders.    
  
They sit together like the two old veterans they are, reminiscing about the crew and adventures of the original Normandy, about Anderson and Saren and the good old days of staging a coup and trying to survive it long enough to prove to the rest of the galaxy that they weren’t being manipulated - or delusional. Even the run with Cerberus and its inherent bitterness has managed to completely wash away that feeling from her mind, that frustration of being the only ones who seemed to spot the goddamn elephant in the room. Shepard used to stand on deck whenever she couldn’t sleep back then, just  _ stand  _ there, staring out at the stars and trying to calm herself by counting them. They were always infinite like the clichés state and that thought never did bring any comfort to her. She likes solvable puzzles, mysteries she can break down into parts and  _ fix _ . Infinity can’t calm her.    
  
“We’re not going to be victorious this time,” she says suddenly, looking down at the last brandy at the bottom of her glass. “Not unanimously.”    
  
Chakwas gives a slow nod. “Have we ever been?”   
  
“Guess not, but this time….” Shepard sighs. “It’s worse.”    
  
“It’s certainly  _ bigger _ .”   
  
“Yeah.” Downing the drink she reaches for a refill and catches Chakwas’ gaze across the low table.    
  
“But you have nine lives like the proverbial cat, Commander,” the other woman says and smiles and for some reason it makes Shepard smile, too.    
  
“Don’t even  _ say  _ that. That means I have, what, seven deaths left?”    
  
“Ah, but to be practically immortal…” Chakwas pours more brandy into her own glass as well. “I’d be interested to experience the different ways to die, if nothing else.”   
  
“Really?”    
  
Shepard has never pictured the Normandy physician as one to romanticize immortality - she’s not nearly sentimental enough, far too practical - and isn’t surprised when Chakwas laughs, shaking her head and her already-emptied glass.    
  
“Just joking, Commander. Cerberus couldn’t bloody pay me enough to keep me alive for hundreds of years!” The bottle in her hand is almost finished and she splits the content evenly between their glasses. “Best case scenario I have drinks in a peaceful colony somewhere in my old age but I’ll be content seeing this mission through.”   
  
They might be drunk but there’s a sobriety in this, Shepard thinks. A sort of solemn vow, ancient Earth style. She raises her glass.    
  
“Here’s to seeing things through.”   
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
“You did _what_?” Zaeed’s cybernetic eye is fixated on her and the good one gives her a stare that’s caught somewhere between irritation and awe. “You’re out of your goddamn mind.”  
  
“Hey, I succeeded. That’s what counts.” She folds her arms, looking at her latest guest with the last traces of her drunkenness vanishing rapidly. Worst part about drinking is that last stage, the sweet intoxication giving in to clarity and sharp edges. It usually leaves her torn between the desire to add more alcohol to her blood and the desire to never drink again in her life. “And how did you even know about it, by the way?”  
  
“That beefy marine of yours. Vega. Asked why he hadn’t been bugging the hell out of me for a couple of days. Told me you’d gone under the fucking ocean on some remote planet.” He shakes his head. “Sounded too goddamn stupid even for you.”  
  
Shepard grins a little to herself at the description of both her lieutenant and her recent mission. There’s a glint in Zaeed’s eyes though, a spark of something there that’s telling her he isn’t overly amused, that there’s _more_. It twists inside her, a jolt down to her belly.   
  
“It was a really weird mission,” she admits. “Even for the Normandy crew.”  
  
“Yeah.”   
  
He still stands by the entrance, leaning against the wall in the hallway and looking at the interior with that same expression on his face as he had when he first arrived - following her coordinates and very spontaneous and ill-advised message. _Vodka at the Silversun strip? My place. S._ Because clearly, more vodka is just what she needs right now.   
  
It had occurred to her as a strange thing even as she typed the words, _such_ a strange thing that Zaeed Massani of all people is someone she texts in the middle of the night when she’s been drinking and doesn’t feel like stopping. That he’s the friend she calls after a really good night out, just to hear if he, maybe possibly, wants to extend the fun for a while.   
  
That he’s a _friend_.   
  
Looking at him now, seeing him, she knows he isn’t. That he hasn’t been in a long time, not since the early days, back when she threw a pistol in his face and lectured him about ethics as a whole damn factory was about to explode. She had despised him in that moment, for being an awful, bitter wreck of a man. For _allowing_ himself to be one when she had glimpsed better things in him already.  
  
It’s easier to see them now.   
  
And he’s not a goddamn friend.   
  
Something swells in her chest, spreading warmth to the pit of her stomach and further down, ignoring whatever explanations Shepard manages to come up with for what it is that passes between them. A fleeting insanity she had considered it back on the Normandy after they both scraped by through the Omega-4 relay, an itch in her body that she had needed to scratch and claw out of her and he had been there, he had been _there_ in a way nobody else was because there were parts of him that resonated with parts of her. _Parts_ , she thinks, still fairly drunk after all because the word makes her grin.   
  
“What?” Zaeed asks. He’s shifting position, still tense and she wonders if he thinks she’s laughing at him.   
  
“I’m just… I’ve had _drinks_.” She makes a vague gesture towards the living room where she and Chakwas had shared their bottle of Serrice and then some wine she found in a cupboard. If Chakwas hadn’t gone and called a cab, they’d probably still be at it, rummaging through more of Anderson’s supplies. “A few.”  
  
 _Finally_ he seems to relax a little, a layer of his posture relenting somewhat where he stands, still watching her like he doesn’t trust her not to be up to something. Does he think she is? Everything is just so incredibly weird lately, she wouldn’t even be surprised if that was the case.   
  
“You don’t say, Shepard,” he drawls, voice dropping slightly whenever he does that, making it sound even rougher than usual. It’s a tone reserved for his best stories - the ones she actually _listens_ to with full attention and the occasional sense of excitement - and for flirting. The countless hours she’s spent down in the cargo hold with this man, throwing cheap lines and crude jokes at each other. His crooked smile now reminds her of that time, those days, that _dare_ in her captain’s cabin. It was more than that, though, and all of it has returned in bits and pieces since Zaeed arrived at the Citadel, trickling back into her life. Now that he’s here again it seems he always ought to be.   
  
That thought with all its implications leaves her _exhausted_ , so she pushes it away quickly.    
  
“So,” she says, nodding towards the sofa and the table nearby. “You came for the vodka, didn’t you?”  
  
Zaeed arches an eyebrow, gaze roaming now, pausing at her face, her chest and then landing on her ass. _Ever predictable,_ she thinks to herself. Every time he gives himself permission to stare, he ends up staring at her ass. He’s unfolded his arms now, lowered his shoulders, but is still leaning against the wall, resting the back of his head there among the steel-and-artificial-wood.   
  
“Depends,” he retorts after a while.   
  
Shepard can feel his stare like a presence in her own body, a dull echo of that night on the Normandy. It had been different, that’s what she had kept thinking to herself, over and over as she picked up stray pieces of clothing the following morning when Zaeed had already left. Different to what she has had before, different to most things she has felt, different because nobody has looked at her the way Zaeed fucking Massani looks at her and it’s a pretty terrifying concept, all things considered. That it’s him, that it’s them. That it’s so _special_.  
  
“Depends on what?” She walks closer; he takes a step forward.   
  
“On how bloody drunk you are.”   
  
“I know what I’m doing, if that’s what you’re asking.”  
  
“Yeah.” His voice is muffled now, thick in a way that makes her head spin. When she grins, tilting her head upwards, Zaeed grabs her by her waist and before she’s had time to reply his hands are pressing her up against him and his mouth is on hers. “That’s what I’m asking.”  
  
They kiss, open-mouthed, hungry, _breathless_ and Shepard twists in his arms, pushing him against the wall again to get a better hold of him, her hands grabbing his shirt, her knee between his legs. He smells of leather and oil, tastes of smoke and fire, the way she remembers it. That sharp, bitter hint of tobacco at the back of her tongue, reminding her of open fires, burning buildings.   
  
Her hands  - eager, rough, careless from alcohol and _want_ \- run down his sides and she can’t get enough of how damn _solid_ he is, the way her fingertips dig into muscle and flesh everywhere they touch, the way his broad frame holds her in position even when she’s the one pushing him up against the wall. Can’t get enough of how his skin tastes, the salty scent at his neck, her tongue swirling over ink and scars. He catches her mouth with his, kissing her every bit as ferociously as the last time but this time with a stronger sense of purpose, a direction and determination in his moves that makes her dizzy. His leg press up between hers; she tils her head back, groaning loudly and his mouth moves to her throat, teeth grazing, his lips marking her.   
  
“There’s a bedroom,” she mutters into the back of his head as he begins tearing her t-shirt off, mouth closing in on her nipples. “Or - _shit-_ ”  
  
She stumbles back when he spins them around once more; her nails dig into his scalp while her free hand reaches for his belt and now Zaeed makes a sound, low and drawn-out and Shepard bites the inside of her cheek. _This_ , she thinks dimly. This is what will be the fucking death of her if she dodges the Reapers. His gradual lack of control.   
  
For all his passionate rage and and violent outbursts Zaeed is a deeply controlled man. Sometimes Shepard wonders if she’s the only one who can see it, if the reined-in emotions beneath the unpolished mercenary persona are apparent only to her. The gaps in the role he plays, all the billion little fractions in it, that’s what’s brought her here in the first place. And to watch him squirm under her hands, hear him groan into her ear before he grabs hold of her thighs and lifts her up.   
  
“Too old to fuck in a hallway,” she hisses as Zaeed’s thumb hooks into her pants, dragging them down. He teases her with another finger, dragging it slowly and exactly across the spot where she’s wet, already aching to be touched but he doesn’t touch her, not yet. Because for all his passionate rage, he possesses a frustrating amount of restraint when it comes to this and it resonates fiercely inside her, makes her want to claw at him, _claim_ him like an animal would.   
  
“Speak for yourself, Shepard.” His voice is gravelly, like something from the earth itself.   
  
But he doesn’t protest when she steers them - in his embrace, her legs hooked around his hips and his mouth locked on hers - towards one of the ridiculously spacious bedrooms in the apartment where the vast windows and the luxurious bed gives even someone like Zaeed pause.   
  
“Some place you’ve got here.” His stomach against hers, only his shirt separates them now and soon not even that since she’s managed to get it open. “Living like goddamn royalty.”  
  
“Serves its purpose,” she retorts and throws his shirt on the floor, her mouth greedily searching for his again. His belt goes the same way and her hand rubs over his cock through the thick fabric of his pants, which makes him curse something inaudible into her hair and it doesn’t matter what he says, she thinks, it’s the way he _says_ it, the way his voice drops and every syllable sounds like filth. Pure, delicious filth.   
  
Shepard shoves one hand to his chest to free herself and he drops her, still kissing her; she maneuvers them both towards the bed, fumbling with the pants at the same time and _fuck_ , he’s hard under her touch and she drops a kiss at the hollow of his throat.   
  
Struggling out of their last pieces of clothing, they’re finally on top of her bed, his left hand splayed across the small of her back while the right one trails a path inside her, thumb slick and slow and she rocks against him, arches in his grasp. His rhythm increases until it’s a fluid thing, in sync with her movements and his heavy breathing and she buries her head along the thick muscles of his shoulder when she comes, lips pushing against the veins in his neck. Zaeed groans too as she shudders, clasping hold of him even tighter as the orgasm fades away.   
  
Then, before she’s properly caught her breath he’s inside her and she throws her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist, pushing him deeper.   
  
When they’re both finished, their bodies spent and sweaty and hers seem even reluctant to move the slightest bit, she lets her arms remain around him and Zaeed doesn’t move his either, his palms against the sheets and his arms thick and strong around her frame in bed.   
  
Rest floods her, pooling up inside with the exhaustion; she closes her eyes for a second. Part of her wants to ask him to stay here with her, wants to tell him how big the place is and how empty it feels, wants him to kiss her a few times before they both fall asleep, in this sweaty tangle of bodies. Wants to wrap herself in this moment, wear it like comfort in the days to come.   
  
There are no _words_ in her for that sort of thing, so she doesn’t speak. She lets the back of her hand brush over his neck, following his spine down to his waist. Zaeed takes it as a cue to get off her and does it with a little grunt, stretching out beside her instead.   
  
There are plenty of things to say but Shepard rubs her eyes and pulls up the sheets around her, crashing headlong into sleep.   
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
She dreams herself awake.    
  
A slow, painful dream-walk through what feels like a desert storm and ends abruptly when she startles, eyes snapping open through that dream-feeling, the overwhelming  _ truth  _ that tells her the world doesn’t make sense.    
  
_ Headache _ .    
  
When she turns her head, something protests in her body. A sluggish sort of revolt going on there, opposing her every movement. She scratches her head, her neck, sits up with some effort at last.    
  
Zaeed, she notices as her gaze falls on the messy side of the bed, is gone.    
  
_ Well, that makes sense, at least.  _   
  
Outside her apartment the Citadel wakes up, mercilessly marching towards another day of warfare.    
  



	11. Clone wars

  
  
“So, I’ve got a favour to ask, Zaeed.” Shepard gives him a long glance, travelling between the crates down here and the small group of squadmates she’s got in tow. The quarian and Vakarian, as well as the Alliance Poster Boy Zaeed is trying his hardest not to feel aversion towards. _Fucking embarrassing, Massani. Get a goddamn grip._   
  
“Right.” He looks at her, wondering what the hell he’s expected to do about the weird emotional impulses that follows their recent encounter. _Encounter_ , he thinks, nearly laughing. What a lousy goddamn word for it. Fucking her in her flat, to be more specific.  Fucking her in her flat and then chickening out, leaving her fast asleep and sweaty and not thinking about all the deliciously dirty things he could have done to her in the morning, had he stayed around.   
  
That thought bothers him the most. The fact that he’s delusional enough to think she’d want him to stay in her bed, the fact that he’s _wrecked_ enough to consider it. It’s not like he’s got any idea what they’d do together, besides shagging each other’s brains out. Having eggs and bacon and watching the ANN? That kind of domestic bullshit bliss is forever lost for people like the two of them anyway. Not to mention the fact that they’re living through Armageddon.   
  
He shakes it off, folds his arms across his chest as he hears her out.   
  
“If you see someone looking for me, someone you don’t recognize or, _fuck_ , I don’t know - send me a message.” Shepard lets out a deep breath. She sounds wound up, keeps checking for messages. “Okay?”   
  
“That’s a damn vague request, even for you.”   
  
“I know.” Shepard holds his gaze for a moment and he’s about to say something else, _anything_ else.   
  
“It’s a long story.” The quarian adds, unhelpfully.   
  
“Right.” Zaeed doesn’t feel finished.   
  
But Shepard disappears, so apparently they are.   
  
  
  
  
\---   
  
  
  
  
If there’s one really weird thing about the whole War Against The Reapers and Race Against Goddamn Time routine they’ve got going now, Zaeed decides, it’s the fact that he spends so many hours standing around. They all do. Loitering about while crap burns around them, waiting for stuff. Orders, plans, calls.   
  
More than half the people they wait for are, statistically speaking, blown to pieces or about to be, which makes waiting even more pointless. If they could at least get immediate notifications of their wounded and dead but the networks are slow as volus, intel and info sort of trickling back into their systems. Zaeed scratches the back of his head and stares at his omni-tool where no recent news headline speaks of anything but losses and defeats. _The Systems Alliance loses previously conquered territory in the Nebula system,_ Asari News Network reports. _Desperate times for the Turians._   
  
No shit.      
  
He misses being a merc, even an non-glorified one jumping to action for small bounties and shady deals, because at least that means some goddamn _action_ .   
  
“Give me something to do,” he writes to Shepard as he wonders about the fact that he hasn’t even seen her in days.   
  
He’s just about to give up on the hope of having a reply when the screen flickers and he sees Shepard’s signature.   
  
_\- Not right now. Ambush. Unknown mercs._   
  
\- Who in their right goddamn mind chats during an ambush?   
  
_\- Me, apparently. Later, Zaeed._   
  
\- Don’t get blown up.   
  
But Shepard logs off before she’s seen the last reply and no matter how much he glares at his omni-tool the last message remains there, unread but written. Carved in goddamn metal.   
  
  
  
  
\---   
  
  
  
  
It’s actually therapeutic to fight like this, Shepard decides, on her knees down in the wards. She’s crouching behind a desk to reload the pistol she managed to find before, trying to plot a brief strategy in her mind for getting to the shuttles ahead.   
  
It’s saying something about the recent situation that she finds an ambush relaxing but she does. She _does_ . Shooting blind at unknown attackers isn’t the way she had hoped to spend her day off but damn it if it’s not awakening old memories and half-sleeping instincts to be doing it like this. Battle by the books, Survival Scenario 45b in the N7 program if she remembers correctly. Shepard had been trapped inside a parking house down on some remote moon base, stumbling around a dozen shuttles with nothing but her suit and a handful of grenades to start with.   
  
She knows this. At her very core she _knows_ this.   
  
Pick them off one by one, reload, catch your breath, continue. Rinse and repeat. It’s not Reapers, it’s not whole worlds being erased from the galaxy map.   
  
“Liara here.” Her voice crackles a little, but the signal’s surprisingly clear. “All of us are on our way.”   
  
“Good to hear. Things are a little… dicey.”   
  
She throws a spare grenade into a crowd of snipers and waits, counting to ten before checking to evaluate the damage dealt. Three down, two to go.   
  
Kaidan’s voice on the comm now. “Shepard, what do we know about these mercenaries?”   
  
_They enjoy light reading and romantic strolls at the beach._ The pistol is hot in her hand, still recovering. She forces herself to breathe slowly, her voice to stay calm. Even during deep space survival ops, that’s how you do it. Basic body control will keep you alive just about long enough to finish everyone else off.   
  
“They have guns and don’t like me,” she retorts, knowing that he’ll smile and be annoyed with her at the same time.   
  
“Very helpful. Thanks.”   
  
“No problem,” she says and dives behind a broken storefront in order to escape a cryo grenade.   
  
  
  
  
\---   
  
  
  
It’s been three hours and still nothing.   
  
Zaeed wastes half a fortune at the Silversun Strip casino, waiting for news that never comes.   
  
He sends her another message: _still in one piece, you daft bint?_   
  
  
  
\---   
  
  
  
  
The screen above the bar in her flat snaps into action as the ANN network appears. Special broadcast tonight, the announcer says. Dedicated to Admiral David Anderson of the Systems Alliance and _to all of our soldiers out there, fighting and dying to keep us safe._ As if that would matter.   
  
Shepard rubs her forehead. The medi-gel has hit every bit of her system now and she feels drowsy but anxious, that familiar _tingle_ inside.   
  
“So, black tie required for tonight, huh?” Cortez smiles sideways at her from his seat across the room. “You don’t seem the type for it.”   
  
“What, you don’t think I love being with the riff-raff. In heels. Stumbling about.” She can’t help the little wince that escapes her, making him laugh.   
  
“I’m wired the same way. Damn, I hate those heels.”   
  
With a mug of coffee in her hand, Shepard slumps down on the couch beside her pilot and as the caffeine joins the medigel in her blood, singing the same low humming song of restoration, she tilts her head back against the wall and rests her feet on the coffee table.   
  
She checks her incoming calls and messages for the first time since she got trapped in the wards and notices the last chat message from Zaeed. The words are like tiny little blows, one by one, hitting her hard and weird because she truly can’t make any sense of what the hell they are doing with each other. _To_ each other.   
  
Cortez seems to read her mind because he studies her over his drink, studies her _meticulously_ as if watching for signs of any irregular or suspicious behavior. Damn Alliance soldiers, she thinks for a second. Easier to slip out of sight out of mind on a Cerberus vessel where you don’t want anyone to watch your back because they’ll put bullets in it. Here everyone’s trained to keep each other in line - _out of compassion_ , as one of her tutors used to put it.     
  
“That bounty hunter - there’s something there, isn’t it?” he asks, suddenly and Shepard swallows her instinctive retort - _don’t be an ass, Cortez, of course there’s nothing_ \- with a large mouthful of coffee.   
  
She shrugs then, averting her gaze to stare at the news instead. _That bounty hunter._   
  
“Hell if I know,” she mutters.   
  
“Then find out,” he suggests after a while, as if he's really thinking it through, turning her issues over in his head the way he'd go over any military matter she'd present.   
  
“Yeah, right. I’ll add that to my to-do list right away.” Shepard downs the last of the coffee and runs a hand over her head. She needs a haircut as well. That damn list is ever-growing. “Save the galaxy, report to Hackett, figure out my private life.”   
  
Cortez shrugs, too, but he looks serious. “Not a joke. Everyone deserves a little personal… something.”   
  
She has to laugh a bit at that expression. “Well, it’s definitely _something,_ alright.”   
  
“You know what I mean.”   
  
There’s that surge at the back of her head again, the strong current of memories residing in her body and underneath her skin, surfacing at the strangest of times.   
  
“Yeah.” She sighs.   
  
“Get it done, commander.”   
  
“Sir, yes, _sir_ .”   
  
He grins widely and bumps his glass into her empty cup, a wordless sort of cheer that makes her smile to herself even as she slips into something much less comfortable than the slacks she’s been wearing all day.   
  
  
  
\--------  
  
  
  
Twenty-four damn hours and she finally stands in the docking bay, leaning against the cool metal rails in the endless corridors outside the equally endless storage of ships and shuttles behind the glass doors. Most of those ships won’t even fly again, Zaeed suspects. Like him, people are trapped here at the Citadel, waiting out a war that won’t fucking quit. He’s glad, at least, for a place to sleep and shower. Most bastards around here aren’t that lucky.   
  
And now Shepard stands here, all dolled up, like a misplaced fragment of another world.   
  
“What’s the occasion?” He eyes her greedily, not even bothering to hide it. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to her that he could spend hours staring at that arse of hers, no matter how many layers of detachment he’s wrapped himself in over the past two years.   
  
“Oh.” She looks down at her chest, a small grin appearing as she appears to remember that she’s wearing a long black dress and heels. Mystery of the goddamn galaxy how women like Shepard can walk around not knowing the impact they have on others. _Maybe because we’re not as goddamn vain as you, Massani,_ she snaps at him in his head. His inner Shepard sure is a downright bitch sometimes but he’s not sure the real one is any softer. “Charity event for the refugees.”   
  
“What’s the point of charity events when the Reapers are going to blow everyone out of the sky?”   
  
She makes a choked noise that he recognizes as muffled laughter. “Don’t ask me, ask Elijah Khan. Or well, you can’t, because he’s dead.”   
  
Zaeed just shakes his head, feeling motion sickness from the surge of information he’s always getting from her debriefs. There’s longing there, too, a stupid sense of missing out on something he’s never actually been part of.   
  
“Elijah Khan?”   
  
“Yeah, it’s a really long story.” A shade of exhaustion creeps into her features where she stands and he wants to ask her to sit the hell down and have a drink, except she’s already looking at the exit, checking her comm for calls every bloody minute. “To sum it up: someone’s trying to get to me. As in tracking me. My records at the archives. That sort of stuff.”   
  
“Damn.”  He exhales. “Why?”   
  
Why not, really? Where Shepard goes, a lot of weird crap follows. He learned that early on, back when he was still a contracted mercenary on a suicide mission and she was an annoyingly sharp leader of a ragtag bunch of losers. It used to fascinate him, trying to think of the next thing that would happen to them, a game instead of counting goddamn sheep when sleep eluded him on board of the Normandy. Then shit got stupidly complicated and these days that game doesn’t knock him out like it used to, instead it keeps him up at night, turning thoughts over and over until he feels crazier than he is.     
  
“We’re looking into it. EDI is. I’m… well, _here_ . I just wanted to give you a quick run-down. In case you -”   
  
Her sentence trails off, the unspoken ending of it hangs there mid-air and Zaeed glares at a group of mercs passing nearby.   
  
“Right.” He nods.   
  
“Look, I-”   
  
“Nice dress,” he cuts her off, frowning at his own damn impulses lately. _You don’t want to hear what she has to say, do you, Massani?_ “Whatever happened to that leather number Kasumi got you?”   
  
That old story makes her smile and when she does, he feels the corners of his own mouth turn upwards, too. Damn, she had been a fucking wonder in that thing. Tall and ferocious and deadly, with an edge to every movement because she loathes formal wear and it shows. Even from a distance, Zaeed had thought back then, you could practically smell the fabric and imagine what she’d taste like if you fucked her in that dress. Exquisitely bloody filthy, most likely.   
  
“Ha!” Her face looks different for a moment - open, relaxed, soft - and her voice is pitched in a more intimate way, a shade of something private creeping into their conversation. Damn this public place, he’d be better prepared for it if they were inside his ship right now, out of earshot. Then he recalls the recent press the Commander of Normandy got for having lunch with the Alliance Poster Boy and stifles a sneer. “No idea, actually. Maybe Cerberus got it.”   
  
“Shame.”   
  
Shepard shakes her head, visibly amused, and he’s about to suggest something - a drink, even though it’s 3 AM if his old Earth-hacked tech is correct; breakfast, though it’s too damn early; a quick fuck in his bunk - when her comm link makes a sound and she turns away from him to answer.   
  
He pretends to busy himself with his omni-tool while she talks - he overhears most of the info about tonight’s big gala and can’t say he’s sad he missed out on the whole shebang, spiked Thessian temples aside - and when she’s done she gives him a brief nod.   
  
“Later, Zaeed.”   
  
_Isn’t it always._   
  
He shrugs, forcing his eyes back to the screen.   
  
“Hey, Shepard-” he calls while she’s still within earshot.   
  
“Yeah?” That slant to her voice lingers, half-buried behind whatever professional matters she’s about to attend to. (He wants to ask her to go the fuck to sleep, but doesn’t.)   
  
“See you around, eh?” 


	12. All in kind of guy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot of the dialogue in the first scene is lifted (and sometimes somewhat tweaked) from the Citadel DLC.

  
  
  
  
  
  
The casino down at the Silversun Strip feels crowded even though there’s only a handful of scattered visitors using the machines today. Surprisingly few people want to waste their money when the world is ending, she supposes.   
  
Still, it’s not exactly a shock that this is the preferred place for Zaeed to hang out.   
  
The only thing that slightly surprises her is the fact that he, out of everything he can choose from, has picked Claw as his poison.   
  
“Cerberus paid you way too much, didn’t they?” She slides up besides him; he doesn’t remove his fixed stare from the claw machine but she can tell that he’s noticed her presence. “You don’t have to work anymore so you can really devote yourself to these things.”  
  
“Right. Must be it.” He hits the machine with his fist. The noise alerts two of the security guards who gives them both a warning glance but Shepard can see how at least one of them - a short girl with perpetually raised eyebrows - recognizes her and her stance softens. “You’re mine, you bastard.”  
  
Shepard leans her shoulder against the glass surface that separates them from a world full of stuffed animals and various plastic treats. Zaeed barely gives her a glance. But still, she thinks to herself, for all his irritation he looks more relaxed than she has seen him in a while, standing here fighting with a vending machine. Hell, she knows _she_ would feel a lot more relaxed fighting with a vending machine rather than the Reapers. At least Claw won’t turn her into a brainless husk.   
  
“Is it the pink turian over there?” she asks, feeling oddly calm today as well. She’s slept well, for one thing. Once the myriad of irritating thoughts about her clone and possible implications of _that_ had left her mind, at least. It’s been a weird ride lately, but when is it not. “Or hey, I know, it’s the purple asari. Only an asari could make you waste half your remaining lifespan on Claw.”   
  
Zaeed glares at her. At the bottom of his gaze, she can see a glint of something that she’d like to dig deeper into, a bared vein of emotion hidden like treasure.   
  
“Funny,” he drawls.   
  
“I know.” She looks out over the room and wishes for beer. Days like these, she always wants beer.   
  
“So. Isn’t there something better we could go do?”  
  
For a second the tone of her voice seems to lure him away from the thrall of the game, but then he snaps right back into it, grunting.   
  
“You could probably buy one of those, you know,” she points out, though she knows it’s meaningless. It’s the same mechanisms there as the ones behind her sessions with training sims, those endless nights during N7 when she had her goals set and no clock or basic need in the galaxy would steer her off course. “There’s a merch down at-”   
  
“It’s the underlying goddamn principles Shepard.” The claw rises from the mountain of plushies in an agonizingly slow fashion, seemingly with something in its jaws - only to drop it again and return to the start position. Zaeed shouts at the buttons under his hand and turns, momentarily, to Shepard. “What could possibly be more important than Zaeed Massani not getting bested by some fucking kid’s game?”  
  
“Well, off the top of my head-”  
  
“ _Principles_ , Shepard.”  
  
“Right.”  
  
He turns to her properly now, their gazes meeting even if she can see how his good eye keeps trying to observe the machine, too. Guarding it with his life against any scrawny little kid that would dare approaching them where they stand. Shepard can’t imagine anyone would. She shakes her head, grinning, because he does that to her and because her amusement rubs off on him, he smiles back. Closed-off, sarcastic smile lingering in the corners of his mouth.   
  
“Goddamn right,” he says.   
  
“Alright.” She nods. Coming here, she hadn’t been sure what to expect from his characteristically brief message: _Come meet me at the casino. Z._ She had hoped for dinner somewhere greasy and pleasant, had hoped for enough drinks for them to end up at her place. At the end of the day, though, it doesn’t matter. Time’s running out for all of them and she can just as well be here, with him, doing this.   
  
“Credits.” He nods towards the pockets of her pants, as if she’s carrying some around. “I’m out of them.”  
  
“No shit. But even a bounty hunter gets to use his manners every once in awhile.”  
  
There’s a brief pause and Zaeed raises an eyebrow, studying her face. “You want me to beg?”  
  
“Always, Zaeed.”  
  
Now she’s met with a low chuckle, at least, and his eyes are firm on her instead of the machine. He studies her with his trademark smirk that immediately reminds her of other times, other scenarios and the idea of that still makes her somewhat dizzy. Skin, she thinks. She’s still so fucking starved of skin to skin, another body next to hers. Even his, _especially_ his. So many things left to learn about him before everything goes to hell.   
  
That familiar _ache_ , the subdued grief for a world that’s about to end; she can feel it fill up her chest and throat as her gaze travels over the room. All these people, the faces and unlived futures; they’re wounds in the fabric of the galaxy.  
  
“Okay, so where to?” she asks to clear her head.   
  
Zaeed shrugs even if the look in his eyes is far from casual, even if nothing is as light-hearted as the things they force themselves to do while they wait.   


“How should I know. What do you feel like? Apollo’s? More claw?”  


Shepard laughs and at least  _ that’s _ genuine. Trust Zaeed to bring out the true emotions in her well-guarded and deeply professional existence.

“Okay,” she agrees. ”One more try. But this time you play with your own damn credits.”

“I’m man enough to pay for my own addictions, Shepard.” He sounds annoyed, but she can tell that he’s just teasing her. 

“Addiction? After just one night?”

There's something passing in his face when they look at each other now, something right below the surface.   
  
“I’m an all in kind of guy.”

Flashes and flurries of memories: their fists relenting on the used sheets, fingers unfolding and untangling; the scent of him in her palms, the taste of her on his fingertips; his hands around her face, her mouth on his neck; a quiet, breathless moment afterwards when their bodies had been beating together in a slow, heavy rhythm, a drawn-out gasp for air. 

“You know,” she says and her voice drags, like the lingering desire in the air between them. “I think I knew that about you.”    
  
A little grunt as Zaeed turns back to the Claw machine. “You should.”   
  
“Hey, Zaeed-”   
  
He looks at her over his shoulder, gaze open now and suddenly she knows he’d go anywhere with her if she asked. The insight lands inside her with a loud rumble, the sound of thunder.    
  
And then the sound of her channel activating, important message incoming. Shepard bites back a string of curses. How can anything be important  _ now _ ?   
  
“We’re having a party tomorrow,” she says instead of whatever confession she had been on verge of making only seconds ago, whatever raw instinct she would have given voice to. “My place. I’d like you to be there.”    
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
It’s not a bad party as far as parties with your crew goes.    
  
At least that’s what he assumes - it’s been a good thirty years since he had a crew like this and even then they wouldn’t have organised something beyond bringing booze to a remote location. And trying not to shoot each other.    
  
The place is just crowded enough, the music’s decent and he’s had a few really strong drinks to take the edges off. And here comes Shepard, walking towards them with a beer in one hand and the other tangled up in her hair, raking through the weird haircuts she always seems to get in a quasi-seductive manner that always makes something in him snap.    
  
“I’m going to bring it up,” Garrus says suddenly, tearing Zaeed out of his comfortable inner place.    
  
“Yeah?” He doesn’t stop looking at her, doesn’t know how the fuck he could. “Good luck.”   
  
Shepard has reached them now, leans against the railing and grins. “What are you two gossiping about? You’ve been up here for ages.”    
  
“Well, Shepard, here’s the thing,” the turian starts and then they’re off.    
  
Filling in some of the blanks and adding the occasional curse, Zaeed listens to the summary of what started as a casual rant about massive windows and the downsides to living among others like this - and ended up in a more bizarre notion involving snipers, assassins and elaborate plots. He can see Shepard’s face go from neutral to concerned via a bunch of half-arsed attempts at keeping a straight face.    
  
In the end, she laughs.    
  
“I’m letting this go.” Garrus moves towards the stairs. “For now.”   
  
Shepard remains where she is, observing him and the party downstairs. Her free hand in the air, nails painted blood red. It’s the first time he’s seen anything like it - make-up, accessories, you name it - on her and she catches him staring. A small, private smile creeps into her features. Zaeed swallows the remains of his own drink, trying to get the constrictions in his throat to ease up.     
  
“I guess you’re really worried about the security, huh?” Her voice is the same as it always is, but her tone is low, poignant.    
  
Zaeed looks out the large window, shrugging. He hadn’t been, actually. Not until he got into a long goddamn discussion about it with Garrus who got him thinking about security breaches and fuck knows what else. There’s a deep, unsettling unrest in him at the realisation that he’s worrying about these things, like they’re a secret name of a secret fear you are never supposed to mention unless you want the nightmares to come true.    
  
He shifts his weight, annoyed now. With himself, mainly. Who the hell worries about Commander Shepard in the first place? Who the hell thinks someone like Shepard will meet her maker in the safety of her home and not in a burning goddamn shuttle somewhere, blown to shit by Reapers.    
  
_ Someone who can’t stand the thought, that’s who, Zaeed. _ __   
  
“It’s a stupid fucking setup you got here, that’s all.”   
  
“Right.” She looks around, as if she trying to catch all the possible death traps with the mere eye. Part of him wants to point them out to her, drag her along a sightseeing trip in these rooms. Part of him just wants to drink himself to sleep. “You having fun then? Apart from imagining my death by assassins?”    
  
Zaeed nods. “Having fun.”   
  
Down in the ridiculously oversized living room, some of the female crewmembers are dancing to the beat of some modern salarian tune and he wishes that sort of scene would draw his attention the way it used to, back when he was young and could bury himself in escapism of various flavours. Drinking and looking at arses just don’t hold the same magic any longer. It doesn’t empty his mind, doesn’t render him peaceful or even distracted enough not to be aware of everything else that goes on around him.    
  
Shepard’s hand on his wrist then, suddenly, and he turns his head.    
  
“Come downstairs,” she says. “Pizza is on its way.”    
  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
They’ve been at it for hours and Shepard pours herself another drink. Easy on the alcohol, heavy on the juice. It’s really not every day she has fresh juice. Especially not this kind of perfected product, probably inexplicably expensive and difficult to obtain even if you get past the usual channels. The taste of it fills her mouth, just the right amounts of sweet and sour and she makes a mental note to thank whatever person who took their time to bring ten different kinds of juices to her party when she had mentioned she loves it.    
  
That’s  _ dedication _ . If they’re all going to die soon - and chances are they will - that’s the way she wants to go out. Surrounded by dedicated people. She isn’t sure why that matters, only knows that is does.    
  
In the corner of her eye she can see Garrus and Tali, leaning towards something at the same time, gesticulating as they speak. Well, mostly Garrus. Tali looks less enthusiastic, judging by her entire body language and posture. From the look of it she’d guess that Garrus is showing Tali the traps he and Zaeed had been working on earlier.  _ Speaking of dedication. _ Shepard bites into her own smile, stifling it.    
  
Half the guests have relocated into spare rooms or down to the casino, a few might have taken a cab back to wherever they consider home. Two of Normandy’s engineers had been so drunk they had passed out on the balcony.    
  
A good party, by all accounts.    
  
Sipping her drink, Shepard walks towards the quieter parts of the flat. Samara and Liara discuss something by the window and Zaeed is there, sitting by himself in front of the fireplace.    
  
She remains where she is for a moment, just watching him.    
  
He’s on the couch, arms folded across his chest, his face tired but showing no signs of being as drunk as she might have expected him to be at a gathering like this one. The casual shirt looks so misplaced on his body no matter how well it fits into the party scenario they’ve got going on and it makes her grin, mostly to herself. Casual Zaeed, what a marvelous sight. It  _ is  _ a marvelous sight in its own way, even if he’s forever etched into her mind as battle-ready and fully prepared for anything except this thing he does now, sitting in her flat, having drinks and talking about the art on her walls.    
  
Not that he knows anything about art. 

Not that she does, either.    
  
She takes a seat beside him, extremely aware of his body heat as her shoulder briefly touches his. There’s that surge inside her again, the pull of him, the heavy sort of gravity that spins, falls,  _ burns _ .     
  
Around them the party continues in a slow, pleasant pace, but all she can bring herself to care about is here and now. Him.    
  
_ Fuck _ , that’s a scary thing growing less scary by the day. Melting away until everything about him seem probable and logical and something she actually should pursue.  _ Find out what’s there _ , Cortez had said recently and it had been the first time someone else had commented on her personal affairs like that. As if they’re worth analyzing, not just suffocated to death through stubborn ignorance. As if something like what she has with someone like Zaeed is ever more than a quick fuck, no strings attached.    
  
“You think you can hide those weaponised wall fixtures behind my paintings?” she asks, to clear her mind from the overwhelming need to touch him.    
  
Zaeed fixes her gaze; in the middle of everything that happens, twisted into her own feelings for it all, there’s a stillness to him now, to them. A line, a hinge point forming and beyond it everything will be different.    
  
“I’ve always thought you were beautiful,” he says, surprising her. Maybe surprising them both. “There. I’ve said it. Don’t say anything.”    
  
He averts his gaze, busies his hands with the label on his beer bottle. Shepard breathes.    
  
“Beautiful, huh?” Her voice sounds strange, as if it’s rising from someone else’s throat, speaking from someone else’s lungs. And there is it, the vulnerability she can’t even begin to understand. It’s her. It’s him. They ought to be fucking each other’s brains out up against the wall in her manically clean bathroom upstairs, the one with shining tiles and a lingering scent of wild raspberries. She’s never even seen wild raspberries in her life but that’s what the damn air freshener bottle says and she’s not going to argue with it. They ought to be fucking, wordless goddamn fucking but instead they’re here, dancing around each other in a conversation that neither of them seem to make any sense of.    
  
Zaeed sighs. “Told you not to say anything, Shepard.”   
  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
Later, when the party’s definitely over, Zaeed counts the lights in Shepard’s ceiling.    
  
Fifty-seven tiny sources of lights, looking down at him like stars and it strikes him as odd at first but of course it’s not. Of course it’s meant to be stars. A starry sky for a spaceship commander who rests on her back beside him, arms spread out above her head, her chest bare. Goddamn  _ gorgeous _ .    
  
“Still haven’t let me try out that bath of yours,” he says, not averting his gaze for a second. There’s something fucking  _ poetical  _ about women after sex, something about their bodies that’s even more appealing when they’re sweaty and slow, harder and softer at the same time. Better than that pretentious art he had looked at before. Better than most things he can think of.    
  
_ You’re pissed, Massani. Shut up.  _ __   
  
“Uh-huh.” She looks at him with her eyes half-closed and smirk dancing in the corners of her mouth.    
  
“That bath is the fucking size of my first flat, Shepard.” It’s not actually a lie - at least he’s pretty sure it’s not  _ much  _ of a lie.    
  
“This place is made for giants,” she mumbles; one of her hands idly travels from the sheets to the back of his hand, up along his arm. It leaves fire in its wake, even now. Goddamn  _ fire _ . “You can try it out whenever you like, you know.”   
  
“Yeah?” His hand catches hers somewhere south of his shoulder.    
  
“Yeah.”    
  
They say nothing more for a while. Shepard closes her eyes and Zaeed glares up at the fake starry sky above their heads, making his eyes jump from one spot of light to the next.    
  
This, he realises suddenly, is the point where he usually gets dressed again. Picks up his clothes from the floor and furniture and puts them on with no hassle, leaving the same way he came - no comments, no traces left behind. He’s tried it with her, too, for the better part of two fucking years and it doesn’t matter. He can’t. It’s nothing goddamn casual about Commander Shepard - she’s  _ everything _ .    
  
She stirs now beside him, shifting position so she’s lying on her side facing him. One of her arms is slung across his chest, her hand playing with the ancient ink on his right upper arm.    
  
“Stay,” she says suddenly while her thumb rub a swirl off his tattoo. Stupid tattoo, too, on par with her crappy word of the day on the small of her back. He had decided on it on a goddamn whim, wasted and bitter and the ink looks like that, too, every time he sees it. Shitty old days that he won’t regret leaving behind. Even for this. Especially for this.    
  
“Huh?” He frowns, catching her gaze. Not something he wants to get wrong, this whatever the hell it is.    
  
Shepard exhales with her lips on his shoulder. It echoes through him.    
  
“Stay here,” she clarifies. “You can make me bacon in the morning.”    
  
Zaeed feels drunk again, in a different way from before. “Bacon, huh?”   
  
Her voice is as warm as her breath. “That’s right.”   
  
Then she closes her eyes again, looking like she wants to go to sleep right this instance. Can’t blame her for it either, it’s been a long night and a long goddamn  __ life  lately. Zaeed shifts position too, beside her.    
  
He kisses the top of her head, pulls her closer.    
  
And stays.    
  



	13. There's no leaving now

****  
****  
  
The war rages on.  
  
Burns, like the Turian fleet over Palaven, like the civs down on Earth, like the geth she can’t save. Can’t, _won’t_ . The differences and nuances blur. Everything blurs.  
  
Shepard chokes on the decisions, now more than ever, more than is reasonable - they’re geth, geth, goddamn _geth_ and this is war - and crashes hard against the ever-morphing regulations. Did they guide her once? It seems so distant now, everything seems so distant except for this perpetual state of open conflict and desperate battles. They’re all so tired. So worn down beyond repair, their resources stretched thin and breaking; their hearts patched up just enough to live through another day, then another, then another until they no longer know if they hope for a future or fear it. It takes so much from them to just be here that everything that happens feels like the last straw, the final push.  
  
Thessia breaks them.  
  
On the shuttle back, that’s the thought pressing itself to the surface of her mind. That they return from this broken, their cause twisted and their hope shattered. What hope is there is the Asari fall? If the reapers crush ancient civilisations without even losing a little ground? What can they possibly have to throw against a threat like this one?  
  
_It’s over_ , she writes to Zaeed. _See you back at the Citadel._  
  
Nothing more than that but he understands, she knows he will make sense of it.  
  
A while later the signal for incoming messages vibrates against her skin and she sees his signature there, like a reminder of something else. Another thing she will lose. The message is brief, even more so than hers:  
  
_Shit._  
  
Nothing more than that.  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
They have no footage from what he gathers has happened to the Asari war effort and Zaeed thinks it’s for the best. Usually he’s not one for sparing people the realities of war but this is not exactly a _war_ \- it’s annihilation and that’s a goddamn difference if there ever was one.  
  
In war people are left to imagine what life would be like afterwards. Here, they can be pretty sure that nothing more will come after the final push. At least he can’t and he’s got a damn vivid imagination.  
  
Now, for example, his imagination has twisted itself so many times around its own arse that even the voice of the self-righteous old admiral Hackett that plagues the Citadel info hubs and arrival/departure hall has begun to sound convincing recently.  
  
Zaeed snorts to himself as he elbows his way through a crowd headed for the elevators and another loud group of people shouting about going to the Silversun strip. Nothing like a spot of urgency to turn sods like himself into mindless idiots, lining themselves up like domesticated animals waiting to be killed for no fucking reason.  
  
Only this time he does the recruiting. Not for the Alliance - he’s got some principles left and nurses those with a ridiculously fierce pride as the Milky Way slowly collapses- but for _her_ . For Shepard. When is it _not_ about Commander goddamn Shepard in this solar system?  
  
“Heard there’s a bunch of bastards heading for Andromeda,” one of the turian mercs says conversationally when Zaeed approaches his destination. A few seats, a makeshift bar, some shitty music from someone’s omni-tool - everything a bounty hunter needs. “Makes me wish I’d been stupid or rich enough to sign up.”  
  
Another merc - an asari privateer, Zaeed recalls, albeit a hugely unsuccessful one compared to himself, which make him feel smug for a second - looks up, shaking her head.  
  
“Yeah, probably not going to be a huge demand for deluded snipers over there, Six.”  
  
Zaeed sits down among them, as if he’s a natural part of whatever little ragtag group they’re pretending to be today. He might as well be. These aren’t really times made for undying loyalty and honoured deals, anyway.  
  
“I’ve got a job for you,” he says, simply.    
  
The other human present - old guy, at least ten years older than Zaeed; his hair’s all grey and a lifetime of bad choices is reflected in the gaze that sweeps over the group of mercs - laughs.  
  
“You? Zaeed Massani. I’ll be damned.”  
  
Zaeed shrugs. “You’ll be dead soon either way. Might want to go down with a bang.”  
  
“And not with a whimper, eh?” The man laughs again. “Aren’t you with Cerberus? Heard they made a huge deal about hunting you down.”  
  
“Yeah, I left.” He could kill for a beer right now. Or some decent food. “Got in, got the credits and left.”  
  
The turian makes a noise that sounds amused, maybe skeptical.  
  
“And here we thought you’d gone and become someone’s pet, Massani.” The asari grins, folding her arms across her chest.  
  
Hell, Zaeed has _missed_ these corners of the galaxy. The seedy, dirty parts where everyone knows everything and nothing gets hushed up by red tape or anxious officers afraid to soil their impeccable goddamn records. These parts of the galaxy are where things get done. And if he knows these people at all, they’ll want to leave some kind of legacy behind even if there’s no one around to admire it, they’ll want to force a mark somewhere, let if be known that for a little while at least, they were here and they goddamn _lived_ .  
  
“Not bloody likely,” he replies. “They’re a bunch of deluded jackasses.”  
  
“Aren’t everyone?”  
  
He shrugs again. “More or less. At least with my offer, you’ll get a chance for glory.”  
  
There’s a slight pause, a stillness to the whole scene.  
  
“Let’s hear it then,” the asari says, predictably.    
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
  
She nearly stumbles into the elevator up to her cabin that night, her body made slow and useless by painkillers and exhaustion and part of her just wants to sleep it all off: the defeats, Kai Leng, Cerberus, the Reapers, the recent conversation she’s just had with Anderson and Hackett, the endless dreadfulness of being the last hope, the spear of the attack, the final futile effort.    
  
No streamlining, she thinks and scratches the back of her head, wishing she had the energy to make notes somewhere as the fragments of strategy pops up. No streamlining, use their lack of understanding of diversity, keep hitting from every angle, every corner. That’s what she had told admiral Lindström of the third fleet yesterday. _Europe has seen plenty of war_ , she had replied. _We’ll make sure we use that to our advantage._  
  
And she wants to sleep it off but she knows she can’t, not for a long while. I’ll sleep when I’m dead but that will be soon and yet somehow further away than her younger self ever imagined back when she joined the Alliance. She was going to throw herself onto a cause bigger than her own pathetic life, get a few shots at making a difference and then she probably imagined a hero’s funeral. Kids always think they’ll die like heroes.  
  
But it had turned out, quickly and brutally, that Jane Shepard has a knack for surviving.  
  
With a sigh she enters her room, the automatic door swishing softly behind her.  
  
“Figured you’d be back soon.” The deep, gravelly voice she’d recognise anywhere is coming from her sofa. Something thaws in her chest at the sound - and sight - of him, comfortably seated, watching what looks like varren fighting on his datapad.  
  
“Zaeed,” she says and wonders if her voice betrays just how fucked up she is after Thessia, if he can hear all the pointless arguments and disputes on the way back, sense just how little hope and how much anger there’s left in her.  
  
He doesn’t turn her head to look at her, barely looks up but gestures towards the table beside him where she can spot beer and plates full of what appears to be - she draws a sharp breath - burgers and fries. _Zaeed_ . It’s almost enough to make her cry but she doesn’t so instead she maneuvers herself to sit next to him.  
  
Her head hurts, her shoulders feel like they’ve been cracked and badly mended all in one day; there’s that sinking feeling in her stomach, a void opening up. Empty, she thinks, staring at the screen where the ugly creatures tear at each other’s throats. She’s empty. Drained.  
  
Then suddenly Zaeed wraps an arm around her waist, pulling her closer; she holds her breath, surprised and oddly touched. It amazes her that he knows how what to do with her, that he hits the spots she keeps forgetting she even has. It shouldn’t come as a surprise - he’s sharp and jaded, he knows exactly what makes people tick and how to use it to his advantage - because she’s always known these things about him. Still, the shocking part is that this is not a game. They’ve left that behind, shed the bets and the stakes along with everything else that disappeared when Earth started to burn. This is not a game and this battle-scarred grump is intimately connected to her in a way she could never have guessed when they first met.  
  
Shepard leans her head against his shoulder and takes a deep, steadying breath.  
  
“My money’s on the fat one in the corner,” she says, blinking as two varren crash into each other.  
  
“Too slow.” He taps at the screen before leaning back again, adjusting her better against him.  
  
“Nah, probably just biding her time.”  
  
She can feel that Zaeed shakes his head; his hand is warm and heavy over her arm, his fingers casually playing with the golden reminders of her rank. She should really change into a t-shirt but there’s nothing in her body that can be bothered to get up and leave this moment right here with Zaeed’s scent of metal and tobacco, of warmth and soap and sweat falling into her thoughts and movements.  
  
“She’s missed her chance,” he mutters, distracted by Shepard’s hand that travels over his chest and stomach. Her body is too tired for it but hell, she doesn’t care.  
  
“Whatever.” She reaches for his belt, suddenly half-panicking in her desire to force something else into her head, her body, erase everything that has happened since they last saw each other. There are times - lots of them - when she doesn’t understand the effect he has on her, the attraction she feels for him; then there are times like these when it all seems reasonable.  
  
“Your fries will be ruined soon,” Zaeed reminds her but his tone suggests he doesn’t give a shit about food either.  
  
He kisses her instead and Thessia fades. For a short, glorious while, it all fades .    
  
Afterwards they eat cold burgers and ruined fries and Shepard’s chosen one in the corner gets her throat slit by a crowd of other varrens, which makes Zaeed arch an eyebrow and glance over at her.  
  
“You owe me credits.”  
  
She swallows a large mouthful of salty, still-delicious fries with a gulp of beer. “You bet on her?”  
  
He shrugs; there’s an amused grin playing in the corners of his mouth and it lands softly in her.

“Suit yourself then for trusting me,” she says, licking her fingers as she finishes her last piece of burger.  
  
“Story of my life, Shepard.”  
  
The varren still fight each other on the small screen in front of them when she sits back on the sofa, tipping her head back. Her body has _melted_ , that’s the best word for it, and she can’t even understand how she’ll find the energy later to get undressed and fall into bed. Absentmindedly she scratches the recent self-inflicted patch of pain on her upper arm - flinches for a second before she remembers its origin - and Zaeed catches her gaze when she does.  
  
“Got a new tattoo,” she says. It feels silly now but it had felt important only hours ago. “Jack’s idea, actually. Wanted us to be easier to find.”  
  
“Right.” Zaeed’s hand comes up to turn her arm slightly, so he can get a better view of the small, still angry-red Normandy signature on her flesh. Shepard bites back a little sound when he accidentally presses down too harshly on the edges of it.  
  
“If you have to drag me out of a pile of corpses, at least you-”  
  
“Yeah, I get the goddamn _picture_ , Shepard,” Zaeed cuts her off and his voice is low and tight like a wound around the words. A dull ache in her belly and her chest when she looks into his eyes, spotting a shade of something she hasn’t seen there before. Grief. The kind of premature, _hopeless_ grief you feel before a battle if you have too much at stake, too much to lose and it makes her head spin thinking of how much that has changed since last time they were on the verge of a suicide run.  
  
She reaches for him again, not having any words for this; he pulls at her, too, his hands firm on her hips as she settles in his lap and covers his mouth with her own. He can’t stay on the Normandy, can’t possibly walk out of her cabin in the morning without raising concerns and rumours and she knows he’ll slip out in a while but for the time being he’s a solid presence in her arms.  
  
His fingers sliding underneath her clothes, quieting everything else.

  
  
  
  
  



	14. Non ducor duco

  
  
The view from the embassy floors at the Citadel leaves a hollow sound in her body where she stands, looking down at all the myriads of lights and movements out there. A carved-out sort of longing, the kind that is impossible to settle or fulfill because it keeps growing. The overwhelming desire that seems part of every organic species, wired into its DNA strings: the will to be a part of something bigger.    
  
_ Is anybody left on this frequency?  _   
  
Shepard leans against the smooth wall panel, flicking through messages on her omni-tool.    
  
Han’Gerrel and the Heavy Fleet reporting regularly about their efforts. A few old Alliance acquaintances checking in every now and then now that the war has severed nearly every boundary and hesitation between people. Kasumi popping in with scant intel and something that sounds like an unspoken apology for not joining the Normandy crew. Shepard means to write back, tell her it’s fine, but she never does.    
  
And Zaeed’s signature, increasingly frequent in her channels.   
  
_ Tonight. Normandy _ , she writes. There’s a memory in her somewhere, scratching the surface now, about her brief tone being a subject of much hilarity way back when she still had shore leaves and pub crawls and a way of communication that didn’t merely contain information of how to survive a desperate war effort.    
  
_ Right  _ and his responses are even less explicit than hers; there are days when she wonders if that’s not one of the reasons she keeps inviting him into her life.    
  
“I had hoped you would show up, Shepard,” Samara says and pulls her back into the present, back into the view that overlooks what remains the grandest achievement of this galactic civilisation, this cycle.    
  
“Of course,” Shepard replies, burying the many thoughts of not going. Not going, not returning, not digging into the recent wounds that Thessia had left and that Samara and her daughters keep reminding her of.    
  
They speak briefly; they don’t have a seat or a drink and come to think of if they’re not that kind of people. Not even back on the Cerberus-run Normandy had they been socialising in the way Shepard had with Jacob or Kasumi. They have become friends, the rigid Justicar and the battered Commander, but their friendship is merely a necessity, just like everything else around them.    
  
“I want you to know that there is no one I trust more to lead us into our final hours.”   
  
Shepard looks up as the words sink into her, like footprints in the sand.    
  
“We’ll be here when the fighting ends,” she says, more of a prayer than a promise. So much of what she thinks come out that way now, as if the Reapers have corrupted the core of her, worn down her personality. “I won’t think about it any other way.”   
  
“That’s wise.”    
  
Is it? Shepard wouldn’t know, wouldn’t even want to know at this point. Everything is the way it is, the way it happens and she has resigned to a point where she just wants to get them all through it to safety, no matter what’s ahead. Once - a hungry marine with curiosity dripping off each request, every single inquiry heavy with intent and purpose - she would have made massive efforts to chart and analyse the reasoning behind something of this scale. Now, having tried it for years, she’s given up that part entirely.    
  
_ It’s finally over. We can stop running. _ Miranda in her head now, a recent image of her surfacing. Back there on the Sanctuary, it had been the first time Shepard had ever seen Miranda Lawson look like a mess - raw emotions, raw injuries, raw bloodlust. It had also been the first time Miranda Lawson had looked alive,  _ living _ .    
  
And that’s it. That’s how brutally simple it is.    
  
There’s something to be said about the ruthless calculus of war, too, of course but there’s no time to say it so Shepard makes a whole new set of thoughts to steer her towards the last battles. Detachment, she thinks. Admiral Hackett had tried to lecture her about it once, in a different lifetime.  _ Reasonable detachment will affect your judgment for the better, lieutenant.  _ She can’t recall what she had replied.  _ Hell no, sir. _ __   
  
Zaeed is already at the docking bay when Shepard gets there, ready to crash into the Normandy like usual these days; it’s like the galaxy is just throwing her around at this point.    
  
He doesn’t spot her at first so she stops somewhere mid-step, seizing the opportunity to observe him for a few seconds. Best source of information about someone, no matter how much tech they develop or how far and fast the relays can transport them. Best source of information and Zaeed looks tired. Worn down and in pain and those two notions sit like stitches in her chest.    
  
“Lost three shuttles today,” he says when she approaches. “Rest of us jumped quick enough but the lazy bastards who didn’t carried all of our eezo.”    
  
A line in his forehead that deepens every time she sees him now, a shadow under his eyes. She wonders but doesn’t really want to know, how he sees her, what terrors she wears in her face. She folds her arms across her chest, inhales.    
  
“That’s bad.”   
  
“No shit, Shepard.” His voice is rough, clipped. It’s new, this feeling of disappointment and despair among everyone, and she has no means of handling it. Not in herself, not in others. Definitely not in Zaeed.    
  
“It won’t make or break the war effort,” she says in a half-assed attempt at comforting someone who refuses comfort.    
  
Zaeed looks like he’s about to say something else but remains silent, shrugging instead. It’s a relief not having to come up with more neutral topics they can discuss out here.    
  
“Food?” she asks, nodding towards the Normandy.    
  
He seems as relieved as she is to switch topics to something banal.    
  
“Sure. Want me to get pizza?”   
  
She considers it briefly, runs the scales of estimated time and effort in her head like it matters, like it’s an actual errand in the middle of a mission, not a matter of pizza or not pizza. When it comes down to it, though, she shakes her head, unwilling to waste any of the time she can get with him. Alone with him.    
  
Most of the crew, she figures as they pass them inside the ship, has an idea of what the hell the bounty hunter - that bounty hunter, Massani - is doing here and most of the crew, she knows, would never let her hear the end of it if things had been different. If time had been different they would have created wild rumours and half-truths and made jokes at her expense but here, on the verge of destruction, people let each other off the hook. All the unspoken consolations, the things you do to remain intact.     
  
“You’re injured.” Later when they’re in her cabin and she’s handing him a glass of wine from her almost emptied supply closet. She puts her own glass down and lets her hand move over a large bruise covering most of his right upper arm; the pad of her thumb softly threads around its outlines.    
  
“Fight with a goddamn smuggler. Don’t ask.”   
  
“Fist fight?” She frowns, observing the reddened knuckles. “Let me see.”   
  
Zaeed sighs and withdraws his hand, moving towards the couch. “I said don’t  _ ask _ , Shepard.”   
  
Dropping it, she sits down a few inches away. Beside them on the table her computer keeps sending notifications about incoming messages; spread out everywhere are datapads with intel running its endless loops, over and over and over again. She doesn’t read them; she can’t  _ wait  _ but there’s nothing inside her that has the energy to take anything in apart from this. Zaeed leans back in his seat, wincing slightly as he raises his arm.    
  
“I want you safe,” she says suddenly.    
  
His eyes go wide and for a moment there’s that unknown depth to them again, the one she’s seen a few times recently and never had the nerve to explore. A depth, a  _ vastness  _ that words couldn’t begin to cover.    
  
“Don’t be goddamn crazy.” She’s grateful that his voice is still rough and impatient even when everything else shakes between them. His brows are arched as he watches her, his arms crossed and his posture stiff, defensive.     
  
Shepard merely shakes her head. “This  _ is  _ crazy.”    
  
She doesn’t know, not really, if she even means the war or the two of them and Zaeed doesn’t ask. Probably doesn’t want to have more specifics.    
  
They manage to get pizza delivered to her quarters - fresh, fatty pizza as an interruption of the paths of conversation neither of them want to actually walk along, and definitely not tonight with less than ten hours left of the uninterrupted time window.    
  
Nine hours and fifty minutes. To be  _ specific  _ and damn it if she can stop being just that.    
  
“So,” Zaeed says once the food is gone and they’ve worked through a full bottle of wine. “What’s up?”   
  
Running a hand across her face and finishing the last few sips left in her glass, she glances up at him. “Reaper war. Don’t know if you’ve noticed.”   
  
Her body feels ready to snap every time a nearby terminal gives a sound or blinks; part of her wants to just close her eyes for a while, get some sleep and wake up again when it’s time to fight. She rubs the bridge of her nose, reaches for another, still untouched bottle and begins to pour herself another glass of wine. When she looks at Zaeed he shakes his head.    
  
“Come on, Shepard,” he says. He leans back, hands on his thighs, his face unusually open. “Bloody  _ talk  _ to me. You’re acting like a daft bitch.”   
  
“Didn’t you use to call me that?”    
  
The memory pops up at the back of her mind, making her grin. How the hell had she managed to get under all that posture and macho crap so fast, so  _ effortlessly  _ that he had become the friend she hadn’t even known she wanted? There are snapshots of it, fractions of the whole that begin to form some kind of puzzle of clues, but the rest might just as well be chemistry. A physical reaction, something really prosaic undoing her brain waves or whatever it is that makes him feel like the soft landing he can’t possibly be, because he’s Zaeed Massani and has no such thing to offer. Though whatever his alternatives are, she’s strongly considering them.    
  
Her question makes him grin, too. “You got better.”   
  
Spotting a bag of vinegar chips on the shelf behind her desk, she suddenly pushes to her feet. His gaze is firm on her every movement, like a tracker in the room. When he notices what she returns with, he nods and grabs a handful of snacks.    
  
Shepard leans forward, elbows on her knees; her leg is brushing against his.   
  
“I don't know what Cerberus has done to me,” she says then, finally. “Or what they will do. You've seen it, you know what I mean.”   
  
“You’re talking about your cybernetics?” He speaks slowly, as if he’s careful to understand everything, even those things that linger in between her words.     
  
She nods. Then shrugs. “Yeah. No. Not just that. The Sanctuary and…  _ everything _ . I’ve seen so many experiments lately.”   
  
“You’re not one of them.”     
  
“Not  _ now _ . But I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what Earth will be like. If we… And whatever happens, Zaeed, I need you to promise me you’ll help me.”   
  
“Help you?” Is there dread in his voice? A tremble? She blinks into her empty glass.    
  
“I refuse to die under their control, or live with reaper tech in my head. I'm not their  __ tool . Shoot me if you have to-”

“For fuck’s sake, Shepard,” he interrupts, his voice rough and impatient now, his expression an angry frown. “I get the goddamn picture even without your details.”   
  
“Will you do it?”   
  
“Shepard-”   
  
“Zaeed.”   
  
“ _Shit_ ,” he says and the syllables get stuck in the air between them, hard and heavy. The word seems to grow before her, expand like a blaster wound and Shepard bites back her own instincts to fight or flight, bites back regret and terror.    
  
“I need you to  _ promise  _ me you’ll make sure I’m not salvaged for any-”   
  
“ _ Yes _ .” He flinches at the word but his gaze is firm, fixed on her. “Okay. Just shut the hell up.”   
  
They’re both silent for a while and the silence makes something snap in her, underlining the twisted demand she had just made and she closes her eyes. Before the Reaper base she had made Garrus promise the same thing, had used the chain of command and he had accepted, wordless and stoic in a way that Zaeed could never be.    
  
_ Could you, Shepard? If he asked the same of you? _ __   
__   
“I’m sorry,” she says. His hand grabs hold of her wrist, pulling her forward into his arms and he growls something inaudible in response. Shepard kisses him instead, kisses him like it’s the first and last time.    
  
Her emotions struggle against the hard, unrelenting reality that’s so close now that it’s scraping the very walls of their homes. She’s already briefed Hackett, has already plotted the course to the Illusive Man’s base; all that’s left now is to travel there. The crew has twelve hours of R&R, of goodbyes and preparations. She won’t ask what they spend their time doing, won’t question in what state they return to her ranks.    
  
Once they bring the fight to the core of the Cerberus operations, they will draw the Reaper war to its final desperate stages and Shepard doesn’t want to sort through all the thoughts and plans for that now; it’s all she can think about, all she can feel, even as Zaeed undresses her, even as his mouth roams along the curves of her breasts.    
  
“ _ Hey _ .” His hands stop touching her and she immediately misses the warmth of them under her shirt.    
  
“Yeah. Sorry.” She lets out a deep breath. His body remains but he steps back from the situation, removes himself an inch or two from her and Shepard sighs, reaching for him again. “Don’t go anywhere. I’m just…  _ shit _ .”   
  
If he is confused or annoyed he doesn’t let it show; he puts his arms around her waist and pulls her closer. She presses them up against each other. She feels his hand on her back, his breath ghosting through her hair and she just sits there, grateful to be  __ held,  for giving parts of her up and handing them over to someone else for just a moment, just a brief damn moment outside of time and place. A shudder runs through her at the thought, she lets it out in shaky breaths that dampen his shirt.    


Zaeed’s fingertips rubbing her scalp, down along the nape of her neck. “You're not bloody crying are you?”

“I never cry.” Her mouth curls into a grin against his shoulder because he asked and because she  _ knows _ , weird and scary as that may sound, that if she  _ had  _ he would have made some sort of attempt at comforting her. It's an amusing enough thought to drive away the worst doubts about everything else.

“Well that's a goddamn relief,” he mutters back.  
  
His heart beats in her palm when she presses it against his chest, beats with a soft thumping into her own veins, swirling around in there with the wine and the tiredness and everything else, every weird little thing he wakes up in her. Save maybe Anderson, he's the one who knows her best; he hardly knows her at all and now he likely never will. There's nothing comforting to say about that. 

“I don’t think we’re getting out of this one,” she says eventually. “I think this is it.”   
  
“Yeah.” He nods with his head against hers. It rocks them both gently. “Probably.”   
  
“It’s not all hopeless,” she tries, like a recording set to repeat, spouting random inspirational speeches at regular intervals. Power moves to further her cause. Alliance brass  _ bullshit _ . “We’ve got a plan. The Crucible - I mean…”  
__   
_ I deem your odds of success remote.  _ A broken record, a stupid Alliance recruitment drive vid looping inside a destroyed building.    
  
And Zaeed catches it every time, forms a sturdy wall in the face of her rants.    
  
“You don’t have to goddamn rally me, Shepard.” He tilts his head back and there’s that familiar, bottomless surge in her at the sight of him, the way he  _ looks  _ at her. “I’m  _ here _ ,” he adds, voice dropping to lower, gentler notes.    
  
“You are.”    
  
Shepard feels the corners of her mouth curl, feels the pit of her stomach burn and when she grabs Zaeed’s shoulders once more, he kisses her with such force that everything else blanks out and finally -  __ finally  \- her mind shuts the hell up.     
  


  
\---  
  
  
  
She wakes up a few hours later, body still warm and slow under the sheets. In the dim light of the room she can see Zaeed standing by her bed and she sits up, raking a hand through her hair. 

“You’re leaving tonight?”   
  
He nods. “Catching a ride with the last of the mercs heading for Earth.”

He's normally a quick dresser but tonight, under the unsettling sky that's watching them from her quarters, he takes his time. Shepard watches from the bed; her face is still flushed, her chest damp and warm and she would prefer it if he stayed, if he returned to her now and wrapped them both in her sheets.

It feels like she could sleep for a full cycle, hibernate somewhere until the galaxy fights itself to shit again.

Boots are on now, he's half-dressed in combat gear but still also half-naked and it's that latter part of him that lingers, an echo from before. His hands then, broad and rough and possessive around her hips; her mouth, almost too-hard, too-greedy; all their tired muscles and unloved stretches of skin craving touch, reaching for each other, pressing,  _ pushing _ .

They aren't sentimental people; their bodies are.

Shepard's misses him already even with London burning at the fringes of her thoughts, that dark prospect of  _ then _ overshadowing everything here and now.

“Hey, Shepard.” Zaeed's voice is a low rumble from beside the bed. He turns and for a second she catches his gaze, that fire in it. “No goddamn heroics now.”

Even her smile is tired, she can feel it fade before it's completely there.

He's dressed now, every part of him covered up and armed and she refrains from reaching out, from placing a hand over his or around his shoulder. They're past that point, past the point of trying to erase reality by clawing at another person's surface, clinging to another person's safety. It's a quiet sadness in her that they never had enough time for it, for that sort of escape.  _ Too messy, _ she had thought back when they started. Too much, too little, too fucked up but nothing is ever exactly as it appears, Zaeed least of all. This had been easier if he were.

As he is about to leave –  _ no goodbyes _ , he's told her once, very recently, that he doesn't say goodbye, that it equals death – she calls out his name; he doesn't look at her, doesn't turn around. His voice, when he speaks, is like a soft sigh, like nothing she's ever heard him say before.

“Shepard-”

“I love you,” she says because she doesn't know how to back down from anything, especially not now on the verge of being erased from galactic history. The grandness of it all aches in her chest, the overwhelming urge for everything she has left to do, to see, to  _ feel  _ keeps pounding at the back of her every thought, driving the words out of her. It can’t be over, they aren’t done. None of them are done. “I  _ love  _ you. I just thought you should know that.”

He turns on his heel then, still without speaking; he merely looks at her for a long while. She can't interpret his expression, doesn't want to.

Then he leaves and they have said  _ goodbye _ and Shepard sinks back into her pillow and wonders if Zaeed is right, that it means death. All this life around them –  _ between _ them – and all these moments of flight, it seems like such a waste. She hates the idea that this carries no meaning at all.

Her omni-tool flashes just as she's about to shut it down and go to sleep. A new message.

_ No heroics. Please. /Z _

  
  
  
  



	15. A future in these lines

  
  
Beside her, Joker is silent.   
  
For as long as Shepard has known him, he has never been silent during flight before, never just offered positions and estimations but an endless supply of information, opinions or just _noise_ .   
  
Now he looks straight ahead, gaze firm on the mass of ships that surround them. She stands motionless for a second, just staring, too. Motionless but then her hands leap into action, travelling up to scratch the back of her head. She opens her mouth, inhales, doesn’t think about the planet down there, doesn’t think about the people down there, doesn’t think about anything apart from the battle.   
  
“On my command, engage the reaper forces.”   
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
The young human pilot - Dax, he recalls, a cocky thing with purple hair and half her face covered in tattoos - swears nonstop during their transit.   
  
“Fucking debris. _Shit_. Watch where you’re going you stupid Alliance fuckhead!”

“Shut up and focus,” Zaeed snaps back. He had wanted to drive his own ship but Dax, everyone collectively pointed out, has never even had a goddamn _scratch_ on any of her vessels and that’s more than can be said about his own adventures. _Never let it be said that Zaeed Massani can’t defer to the experts_ . Even if the experts sound more like annoying kids. “Take your unresolved goddamn issues out on the Reapers.”   
  
The pilot makes an angry little noise. “Whatever, grandpa.”   
  
He grinds his teeth. In his memory Shepard goes over the battle plans twice, then another time before he had managed to get her back into bed, her voice tight with that frantic sort of focus that has been overshadowing everything else lately. _For once in your life, try to keep as many of them alive for as long as possible_ . 

“Approaching London,” another voice cuts in via the open channel. He recognizes it as Brea, one of the most recently recruited Omega mercs. She’s piloting a small fighter, heavily reinforced with every piece of spare tech her crew had managed to stumble across at the Citadel and Zaeed has very specific plans for how to best put it to use.   
  
“Keep following SSV Normandy.”   
  
It’s not much but it’s something, he had decided as they were all tuning in to listen to Hackett’s little speech earlier. _The Systems Alliance wants you, you son of a bitch_ but they’re way past grudges and personal opinions now. Taking the heat off the most important ship in this mess of ships is at least something Zaeed can do with the help of the bunch of random mercenaries and smugglers in his little gang. He wants to say _under his command_ but fuck knows if they truly are.   
  
“Roger that,” Brea says and the channel goes quiet for a beat.   
  
They can see how the allied forces have begun to fire at the Reapers - wrecked pieces of ships and Reaper technology are thrown their way but Dex dodges them - and the field of frigates ahead of them break up, the ships falling in and out of the previous formations like a loud rhythm of war across the skies.   
  
He’s seen nothing like this. No war, no fucked up adventure or bounty hunt in any part of the galaxy has come even close. 

“There's some disturbance ahead,” Brea tells him over the channel. “Lost track of target.”  
  
“Fucking reaper incoming,” Dax adds, steering them so fast to the left that they’re almost toppling over.

Zaeed looks at the map, where he, too, can see the outlines of a Reaper headed straight for the center of London, apparently hoping to land in the exact same spot as the Alliance vessel headed in that direction. 

“Shit,” he mutters through gritted teeth. “That's the Normandy. Fire at the Reaper.”  
  
“You’re crazy.” Brea sounds calm even if her voice is loud. “We can't go in there, Massani!”

“You'll blow that reaper to pieces,” Zaeed replies, not taking his eyes off Normandy.

“That's damn well _suicide_.”

“What the hell did you expect?” He stares so hard at the smooth little warship that his good eye starts to sting, as if he’d be able to magically force it to remain where it is and not give in to the attacking forces. Hell if he knows what Shepard’s actual plan is for London - she hasn’t told him, he hasn’t asked - but whatever it is she needs to get groundside as soon as possible. “Nobody cares if you assholes die or I’m eaten by a goddamn monster down there but I can assure you that if the crew on board that Alliance ship die, we're all going to be husks in a couple of days.”

Dax besides him gives him a searching glance, something uncharacteristically sharp in her eyes. “This sounds personal, Zaeed.”  
  
The night before leaving the Citadel surfaces in his brain; he turns to the pilot and folds his arms across his chest. He must look like a goddamn parody of Alliance brass now, he thinks briefly, a well-deserved fucking mockery of the bastards that lead them into this war.  

“You can bet your ugly ass that it's goddamn personal,” he says. “Problem with that?”  
  
She shrugs. “Guess not.”   
  
“Brea,” he says into the channel. “Get the Reaper off the Normandy. _Now_ .”   
  
A few second of utter radio silence. Then he hears Brea’s voice through the comm link.   
  
“Roger that, you son of a bitch.”   
  
  
  


* * *

  


  


“Almost thought you weren’t gonna make it, Shepard. Glad I was wrong.”  
  
It’s not the time for truth so she doesn’t tell him she almost didn’t. That neither of them did. That it has broken her heart to see the planet on which she was born so crushed under the weight of this invasion, this grand-scale war that will break them no matter the outcome. How can they even restore this? Where do they start?   
  
“You doing okay, Zaeed?” she asks instead, waiting for a bit of fragile hope to return to her thoughts. It usually does - years of military training and N7 regimes will rewire your damn brain - but the rubble of London has put her off guard.   
  
“Yeah, yeah.” He makes a dismissive gesture while taking a few steps closer; the picture gets clearer. “I hope you’ve got one hell of a speech to get everyone moving. Looks like we might need it, never seen anything like this.”   
  
Shepard nods. “Yeah,” she says quietly.   
  
They look at each other, eyes wide-open. All the mission briefings she’s lived through, all the careful planning and precise wording and yet here, now, she can’t seen to drag them out of herself. _One hell of a speech indeed._ She wants to make bad jokes about later; she wants to pretend she’s got a retirement plan ready to launch but those words won’t leave her mouth.   
  
He’s the first one to speak.   
  
“Ready to go when you are,” he says and she can see how he clenches his fists. “Let’s gut the bastards.”

  
  


* * *

 

 

  
  
Afterwards the air is so goddamn quiet.   
  
He hadn’t been back on Earth for more than a few days before the war ended but the Reapers had claimed the planet beyond all reason, had branded their screeching noises and clattering terror into the fabric of reality, until they were everything and filled everyone’s head.   
  
And then: silence.   
  
The war has struck them down, quieted them, bled them dry. These past two weeks Zaeed has seen countless soldiers and civilians die due to lack of proper resources, has watched officers become crippled because nobody could get them meds in time and infections spread quickly under these circumstances. Many of them survive, but his mind returns to the ones that don’t.   
  
_Shepard_.   
  
In this absence of sound he keeps waiting for a sign of her survival.   
  
It enrages him to meet admirals and mercenaries, goddamn businessmen and smugglers walking around in the ruins like they have the right to this place, this post-war _life_ . That he’s still here and she isn’t.   
  
“You should be out there searching,” he growls at Hackett, his voice a twisted shadow.   
  
“We need to focus our limited resources on the people we can still save.”   
  
Zaeed’s head fucking _spins_ with rage.   
  
“I wouldn’t have sacrificed her unless I had to,” the old bastard adds. Tired, _deflated_ like the rest of them but with medals and ranks earned on the back of dead soldiers. Zaeed debates with himself whether or not to punch him in his ugly face but refrains. Probably not a good idea, all things considered.   
  
Afterwards, he catches himself _not_ doing a lot of things but the ones he does, he does really goddamn well.   
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
“She’s waking up!”   
  
“Give me what stims we have ready -- a chart -- someone monitoring her stats--”   
  
Every ghost in her body, every half-sleeping instinct and memory thinks it’s the last time. Again. The last time she had almost died but been brought back, the last time her body had caved in around her and her breaths had slipped out with more and more effort until she no longer recalls breathing at all.   
  
Cerberus, she thinks. Blinks and tries to sit up.   
  
“Slow and steady,” someone says - a soft, throaty voice - and hands on her shoulders press her back into the bed. “We’ve got you, Commander.”   
  
There’s an infusion of something in her body, she can feel it shudder through her system, clearing out some of the confusion and bleariness. Shepard blinks, turns her head slightly to meet the gaze of the person holding her down. Blonde, brown eyes, looks like a sales clerk or C-sec employee. She probably isn’t.   
  
“What happened to the Reapers?”   
  
The woman smiles a little. “Gone, ma’am.”   
  
“Gone?”   
  
A brief nod. Then another face appears - male, middle-age, grey beard and grey eyebrows. He observes her in silence, pops out of Shepard’s vision and returns again, nodding, too.   
  
“I need you to answer a few questions for me,” he says and slumps down on her bed.   
  
Shepard exhales, pushes back the tide of questions she wants someone to answer for her. Last thing she remembers is fighting, desperately, blood in her mouth and eyes and an explosion that damn well killed Alenko and Tali and --   
  
_No_ , last thing she remembers is the Citadel - Anderson, _holy shit, Anderson;_ she needs to let his family know - and the feeling of not being able to take another step, of being pushed gradually towards her own death and how she momentarily had stopped fighting against it.   
  
“I bet,” she says, weakly. “But then it’s my turn.”   
  
The man looks amused. “It’s a deal, Commander.”   
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
She’s sitting on her bed when he enters the room through the half-broken door in the almost cleared out corridor in one of London’s largest hospitals. Her head is still shaved - he assumes they’ve been tampering with her implants or dealing with head trauma; he hasn’t asked and won’t bloody do it either. Better left unsaid. He prefers to think of her as alive, here with them. More fucked up than before, but still _her_ . If he doesn’t think that way Zaeed still feels like she’ll disappear again, that he’ll return here one day and find her gone. Like the Reapers.   
  
“Finally,” she says when she spots him.   
  
“Yeah.” Zaeed nods towards the window. “Crowds outside. Some Asari merchant with plenty of ammo.”   
  
Shepard makes a move, placing one foot on the floor and he crosses the floor quickly. Stubborn woman, infuriating in all her refusal to be careful during her recovery and he has a distinct feeling she will drive him goddamn crazy over the next few months. Her hip had been crushed under the rubble, her right leg had almost been cut off and the only reason she’s standing up and not sitting in a wheelchair is because of the cybernetics Cerberus enhanced her with years ago. Only good thing those bastards ever did.   
  
With an irritated grunt she slips one arm around his neck and leans heavily against him.   
  
“I’ve got you,” he says, wondering if he can ever say it enough.   
  
_Sentimental bastard_ he thinks but answers himself immediately. _Yeah, Massani. So what?_   
  
In those ruins where they found her she had been conscious and for days all he could think about was for how long she had been awake and aware, what she had been thinking about and what she had seen. What sick kind of hell she had been trapped in. Now that has faded away and he thinks more about tomorrow. And the day after that.   
  
The world has fallen but it’s still alive. They’re still goddamn _alive._

Shepard breathes against his throat, her lips brushing over his skin. “So what do we do now that they’re letting me out of here?”   
  
He looks at her, follows the lines of her face, the bridge of her nose and the familiar shape of her mouth.   
  
“Now,” he says, steering them out of the room, “we’re going home.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this fic is finally done despite a few delays here and there. Thank you for reading, commenting, liking and reccing this fic - it means a lot and you're all awesome. I always intended for Shepard and Zaeed to have a (somewhat) happily ever after because I'm not Bioware and I think these two battle-scarred bastards deserve to just sit down and have drinks for the rest of their lives. Though knowing them, I'm sure they're out there being goddamn heroes, too.


End file.
